
















































































































• - 















“Tilings have broken loose quicker than we thought” 



THE 

HILL OF ADVENTURE 


BY 

ADAIR ALDON 

Author of “At The Sign or the Two Heroes,” etc. 

CVvv\jL.^.V-.- i t.;, r JU~ Tvulsv-r 

i 

ILLUSTRATED BY 

J. CLINTON SHEPHERD 



NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 
1922 




Copyright, 1922, by 
The Centuby Co. 


S'/ yr 


SEP 19 1922^ 

©CI.A683279 ^> ^ 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Gray Cloud Mountain 3 

II The Departure of Joe Ling .... 22 

III Neighbors 42 

IV Sherlock Holmes 62 

V Christmas-tree Hill 90 

VI Olaf 106 

VII “My Brother Jack” 120 

VIII Mrs. Bruin 136 

IX A Decision 153 

X Dabney’s Clue . .171 

XI Oyer the Pass 190 

XII Dead Man’s Mile 203 

XIII “Old Friends and Old Times” .... 224 

XIV Hasty Words 242 

XV A Song from Over the Sea .... 263 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

“Things have broken loose quicker than we 

thought” Frontispiece 

PACING PAGE 

“It is you who do not understand/’ he returned 

gravely 82 

He had only to lift his voice, and the long spell 

would be broken 162 

Beatrice found herself telling what had happened . 272 



THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 










THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


CHAPTER I 

GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 

I T was with feelings of doubt that were not 
very far from dismay that Beatrice Deems 
watched her new acquaintance, Dan O’Leary, 
saddle her recently acquired horse. She had 
ridden before, of course, in the tan-bark ring 
of the riding-school or on shady bridle-paths 
in the park, always on well-broken steeds 
whose beauty and grooming were equaled only 
by their good manners. But now, as she stood 
in her short khaki riding-skirt and her high 
boots, waiting outside the great dilapidated 
shed that, in this little Montana town, did 
duty as a liv’ery-stable, she was beginning to 
wonder whether she really knew anything 
3 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


about horses at all. Certainly she had never 
thought of riding anything like this plunging 
creature who stood straight up on his hind 
legs one moment, then dropped to his fore- 
feet and stood on them in turn, with the ease 
of a circus performer. 

She had spent only two days in Ely, the 
little town planted beside Broken Bow Creek, 
in the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. At 
first she had thought that the village, with its 
scattered box-like houses and dusty, shadeless 
street, was disappointingly unlike the West of 
the pictures-books and the movies. The antics 
of her new horse, however, were disturbingly 
like what she had witnessed in Wild West 
shows. 

“’Name’s Buck,” volunteered the man who 
was struggling with the saddle, and added, 
though in a tone that seemed to indicate the 
explanation as quite unnecessary, “It ’s on ac- 
count of his color, you know.” 

“Oh I” returned Beatrice, a little blankly. 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 

For the life of her, she could think of nothing 
else to say. She had yet to learn that all 
Western ponies of that golden buckskin shade 
of coat bear the same name. At the moment 
she was tempted to believe that the title had 
something to do with the way in which the 
horse was humping his back like a gigantic cat 
and jumping up and down on his nimble white 
forefeet. 

4 ‘Your father went out on the range and 
chose the horse himself when he was out here 
getting your house ready,” Dan went on. 
“He could n’t have found another pony in the 
valley that could go like this one.” 

“Did he — did he try him?” Beatrice wished 
to know. 

Her feelings in the matter were oddly 
mixed, for she dreaded the moment when she 
must actually mount to the big, unfamiliar 
saddle, and yet she was all on fire to try the 
horse’s speed. 

“No, he didn’t try him,” was the answer. 

5 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

“He just said he wanted a safe horse for his 
daughter, liked the looks of this one — and well 
he might, — and took my word for it that the 
horse would suit and would go like greased 
lightning, besides. There, now, the saddle ’s 
firm. You mustn’t think anything of the 
way he acts when you pull up the cinch ; they 
all do that!” 

For all her misgivings, Beatrice was no 
coward. She stepped forward, discovered in 
one violent second that a Western pony sets 
off the moment he feels the rider’s weight on 
the stirrup, then flung herself, somehow, into 
the saddle and was away. 

“I did not do that very well,” she was think- 
ing. “Another time — oh, oh!” 

For her very thought was interrupted by 
the sudden rush of wordless delight as the 
horse beneath her stretched himself to that 
long easy lope that is like nothing else in the 
world. The fresh mountain wind, sweeping 
down from the clean, high peaks above, sang 
6 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 


in her ears; the stony road swung past below; 
the motion was as easy as a rocking-chair but 
seemed as swift as thought itself. Motoring 
she had always loved, but she confessed with 
sudden disloyalty that it was bumpy business 
compared to the measured swaying of this 
living creature between her knees. Buck’s 
personal prejudices seemed, indeed, to be di- 
rected solely against the cinching of the saddle. 
That process once over he was as eager and 
happy as she to clatter across the bridge, pass 
the last of the ugly little houses and the high- 
fronted store buildings, and turn his white- 
blazed face toward the mounting trail that led 
out of the valley. 

Beatrice drew rein when they had breasted 
the first rise, and paused a moment to look 
back. The houses strewn haphazard across 
the slope below her made more of a town than 
she had thought. There was the packing- 
box railroad station where she and her sister, 
Nancy, and their Aunt Anna had arrived so 
7 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


recently; there was the house where they were 
living, a little larger than the others, but 
square, hideous, and unshaded like the rest. 

“We mustn’t care for architecture,” Nancy 
had said when they first surveyed their dwell- 
ing rather ruefully, “when the Rocky Moun- 
tains begin in our back yard.” 

There was also the winding stream with 
its abrupt bend that warranted the title of 
Broken Bow Creek, a mere trickle of water 
just now, in that wide, dry valley down which 
the thin line of the railroad stretched away, 
with the straight parallel of the rails seeming 
to bend and quiver in the hot clearness of the 
sunshine. South of the town was a portion of 
Ely that she had not seen before, a group of 
warehouses, some office buildings, and a hud- 
dle of workmen’s bunk-houses. She could see 
the cobweb lines of temporary railroad, a 
steam-shovel moving on a flat-car, and in- 
numerable men toiling like black ants along 
8 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 

the sides of the raw cut that had been made in 
the red soil of the valley. 

“That must be the irrigation ditch that Dan 
O’Leary was telling us about,” she reflected. 
“How hot it looks down there! I did not 
dream they had so many men. And how 
clear the air is! Oh, surely, surely. Aunt 
Anna will get well here as fast as we hope!” 

The wind lifted Buck’s yellow mane and her 
own brown hair, while the horse pawed the 
stony ground impatiently. She let him go 
on, for she was in truth as eager as he. This 
was the first day that she had found time to 
go far from their own house, and she had now 
a most fascinating goal before her. What 
girl of sixteen would not feel excited over the 
prospect of exploring a tract of mountainside 
woods of which she was sole owner? 

Beatrice had never quite understood how 
her father had come to purchase that stretch 
of land above Ely; she had not, indeed, 
9 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

thought to ask. She had come into his study 
one Sunday morning when he was going over 
his papers and had surprised him with the an- 
nouncement that she was sixteen that day. 
Having no other present ready, he had brought 
out some dusty title-deeds and had made them 
over to her. 

“It will never be of the least use to you, my 
dear,” he said, “so do not consider it much of 
a present. Twenty-three acres with timber, 
cabin, and a waterfall, so the description reads, 
but you must not think they are worth any- 
thing. I have never seen the place myself.” 

She had believed that it was on account of 
this talk about Ely that they thought of the 
town again when the doctors had prescribed 
for Aunt Anna “a change of climate — some 
dry, bracing place in the West.” She was 
their only aunt, Mr. Deems’s younger sister, 
and she had cared for his household ever since 
the death of the two girls’ mother years ago. 
She was a slim, frail person of indomitable 
10 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 


spirit, and had begun to look as though she 
were far more spirit than body ever since the 
influenza epidemic had swept through the 
family. Beatrice had always thought that 
going to Ely was her own suggestion, though 
she could not deny that it was Aunt Anna who 
had carried the plan through in the face of 
some rather unaccountable opposition from 
her father. Mr. Deems had finally given in, 
and had made a flying trip to Ely to be sure 
that the air and climate were what they 
wanted, to choose a house, engage a Chinese 
cook, and make all preparations for a sum- 
mer’s stay for his sister and the two girls. 

“I did not have time to visit your estate on 
the hill, Beatrice,” he said on his return. 
“You will have to explore it yourself. Dan 
O’Leary has charge of it and said he rented 
it to some engineers who were surveying the 
mountain, but it is unoccupied now. The 
place may prove to be a good picnic ground 
but I fear it has no other possibilities.” 

11 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


He might say what he chose, Beatrice was 
thinking, but he could not destroy her eager- 
ness to see the place. The trail ran crookedly 
upward before her, disappeared in some dense 
pine woods, then slanted across the spur of 
the mountain and vanished again. Higher 
above rose the bare, rocky slopes of the tall 
peak that dominated the whole valley, Gray 
Cloud Mountain, on one of whose lower, 
rugged shoulders lay her land and her cabin. 
After climbing for a quarter of a mile, she 
was obliged to hesitate at a fork in the way, 
uncertain which of the steep paths she was to 
take. 

A little cottage clung to the bare hillside 
by the road — a shabby place with no paint 
and a patched roof. The door was swinging 
open as she passed and a man just going in, 
a short-set, foreign-looking person, who 
scowled at her over his shoulder when she asked 
the way. 

“That one,” he said briefly, pointing to the 
12 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 


right-hand fork and speaking with a heavy 
foreign accent. “Up toward John Herrick’s 
house, only not so far.” 

He went in and shut the door abruptly. 
Beatrice could hear his voice inside calling 
roughly, “Christina, Christina!” 

He had a roll of large papers in his hand, 
posters that he had evidently been putting up 
along the way, for she had observed them on 
trees and fence-posts nearer town. They 
seemed to announce a meeting of some sort, 
with English words at the top and odd for- 
eign printing at the bottom in more than one 
language. She had felt a hot flash of indig- 
nant anger at the man’s surly tone, but in a 
moment she had forgotten him completely, as 
she and Buck went scrambling up the steep 
and difficult road. 

She came at last to a tiny bridge. Broken 
Bow Creek, which was little more than a series 
of pools in the parched stream-bed in the val- 
ley, was here a singing rivulet, flowing below 
13 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the rude crossing amid a group of silvery 
aspen-trees. At the left of the trail she could 
see a gate, a set of bars hung between two 
rough posts. It was with a beating heart that 
she dismounted to take them down for Buck 
to pass. Once inside she would be on her own 
ground. 

The agility of a mountain-bred pony was so 
new to her that she was much astonished, after 
she had removed two of the bars, to have Buck 
step over the remaining three as neatly as a 
dog would have done. She slipped into the 
saddle again, making a greater success than at 
the first attempt, and followed the nearly in- 
visible path. The huge straight pine-trees 
stood in uneven ranks all about her, their 
branches interweaving overhead, the ground 
covered with their red-brown needles that muf- 
fled the sound of the horse’s hoofs. Up they 
went, with the splash of falling water sound- 
ing louder and ever louder. Here at last was 
the place she sought, a square, sturdy cabin of 
14 ? 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 


gray logs chinked with white plaster, with a 
solid field stone chimney and a sloping roof 
drifted over with pine-needles. She slid from 
the saddle and stood upon the rugged door- 
step. Here was her house, her very own ! 

It was a larger dwelling than she had ex- 
pected and very solidly and substantially built. 
She found that wooden bars had been nailed 
across the doors and windows, and she had, 
moreover, forgotten to obtain the keys from 
Dan O’Leary, so that she could not go in. 
She could, however, peep through the case- 
ment windows and see the low-ceilinged rooms, 
the rough stairs, and the wide fireplace. The 
big trees nodded overhead, the roar of the 
waterfall came from beyond the house, the 
creek, rushing and tumbling, slid away down 
the mountainside. Somebody had planted 
pansies on both sides of the step, pansies that 
crowded and jostled each other as they only 
can in the cool air of the high mountains, 
spreading sheets of gleaming color over the 
15 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


barren soil. With a quivering sigh, Beatrice 
sat down upon the step. 

“Mine!” she said aloud, just to see how it 
would sound. “Mine!” 

It would take a long time to explore the 
place thoroughly. 

“I must be able to tell Nancy about every 
bit of it,” she told herself. 

Yet first she sat very quietly, for a little, 
on the rough stone step. She had hurried up 
the hill, eager to see the new place; she had 
been hurrying for the last two days, getting 
the house in the village settled ; she had hurried 
before the journey: when indeed had she not 
been hurrying? It was very pleasant to sit 
so still and let the silent minutes march by to 
the tune of rustling pine branches and the mur- 
muring waterfall. As she sat looking down 
into the valley, time seemed very big and calm 
and empty, instead of bustling and full. 

She rose at last to go on with her explora- 
tions. Behind the cabin was the tumbling cas- 
16 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 

cade that identified the place, a plunge of 
foaming waters over a high ledge with a still 
black pool below, shot with gleams of sunshine 
and full of darting trout. Beyond the stream, 
almost hidden from sight by the high slope of 
the ravine, was the roof of another house, a 
larger one than hers, with a whole group of 
chimneys sending forth a curl of smoke to in- 
dicate that here were neighbors. Looking up 
the course of the brook she could see where the 
dense shadows of the pine grove ended and the 
waters ran in brighter sunshine on the higher 
slope. 

“I should like to see what it is like up there/’ 
she thought, “but I must be quick ; it is getting 
late.” 

She went scrambling up the rocky slope, 
feeling a little breathless, but forgetting en- 
tirely that in such a high altitude haste is far 
from wise. In a moment her lungs seemed 
entirely empty and her heart began to pound 
against her side, but she pressed on, deter- 
17 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


mined to reach a certain high rock before she 
turned back. It was a rash desire, for pres- 
ently she was obliged to lie down upon the 
rough grass to gasp and rest and gather her- 
self together for another effort. She got up 
to struggle forward again, for she was not 
used to abandoning a fixed purpose, but after 
a few yards she was forced to lie down once 
more, panting and completely exhausted. 

“I don’t believe I understand the Rocky 
Mountains,” she reflected as she lay, limp and 
flat, looking across the barren valley, the 
sparsely wooded slopes, to the rising peaks op- 
posite. She had been accustomed to moun- 
tains like the Adirondacks, round and covered 
thick with forest almost to the summit, 
friendly heights that invited one to climb them. 
It was a far cry from them to the precipitate 
slopes of Gray Cloud Mountain. 

When she had recovered a little she gave up 
her project and slid humbly down the steep 
way she had come. Buck, with his bridle over 
18 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 

the post at the cabin door, whinnied an anx- 
ious welcome as she came back to him. He 
had been searching for tufts of grass between 
the stones, and had also nipped at the pansies, 
but had found them not to his liking. His 
impatience, as well as the creeping shadows 
in the valley below, reminded her that evening 
was near despite the clear sunshine higher up 
the mountainside. Reluctantly she mounted 
and, with many a glance backward at her 
house, rode down the trail. 

Through an opening in the trees Beatrice 
caught a glimpse, as she descended, of the 
house beyond the stream. She could even see 
a man ride up to the door and a girl come run- 
ning out to greet him. Then a drop in the 
trail hid both house and people abruptly 
from her view. 

The warm sun seemed to be left completely 
behind as she and Buck pressed onward with 
all possible haste. Something new caught 
her curious attention in a moment, however, 
19 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

and made her stop again. To the right of the 
pathway, in a little clearing among the pines, 
she had spied the glow of a tiny fire. 

“Who is burning brush on my land?” she 
questioned inwardly, with a throb of pride at 
the thought of her proprietorship. 

Guiding her horse among the trees, she rode 
a little nearer to investigate. The blaze was 
kindled skilfully between two stones, evidently 
by the hands of some one who knew the dan- 
gers of careless camp-fires in a pine grove. 
Bending over the crackling flame was a 
woman, with a yellow handkerchief covering 
her hair and a green shawl slanting about her 
hips above a shabby skirt. A big basket 
stood beside her, showing that she had been 
gathering berries in the wood, while an appe- 
tizing smell rising from the fire told of a sup- 
per of bacon and fresh trout. The smoke was 
in her eyes and she was, moreover, intent on 
balancing the frying-pan between the stones, 
so that she did not see Beatrice. For this the 
20 


GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN 


girl was thankful, since, after a glance at the 
other’s broad, brown face, she concluded that 
one ill-mannered foreigner was all she wished 
to encounter that day and that she would push 
her investigations no further. She turned her 
pony to make for the path again, but a rolling 
stone, dislodged by Buck’s foot, attracted the 
woman’s attention. Beatrice looked back to 
see that the stranger had abandoned her cook- 
ing and was standing erect, staring intently 
after them. 

“At least she cannot follow,” thought the 
girl with some relief; then observed, with a 
sinking of the heart, that the woman had 
turned abruptly and was hurrying down the 
hill through the underbrush. It was plain 
that she intended to reach the road first and 
intercept the horse and rider at the bridge. 


21 


CHAPTER II 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 

T HE yellow pony, stamping and sidling, 
came to an unwilling stop before the 
sturdy figure that blocked the way. Beatrice 
began to see that the red firelight had made 
the woman seem unduly terrifying and that 
her face, while it was sunburnt almost to the 
color of leather, was merely a square, stolid 
one, with keen, blue eyes and heavy, fair hair 
showing under the picturesque head handker- 
chief. With one hard, big hand, the stranger 
was feeling within her dress and, as Beatrice 
came close, she held up a letter. 

“I saw you in town yesterday, and you 
looked kind. I want you to read my letter 
to me; I cannot read English myself. My 
22 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


name is Christina Jensen. The letter is from 
my boy.” 

She spoke with a strong accent that, while 
it was somewhat like that of the man from 
whom Beatrice had asked the way, was not 
unpleasant, for her voice was rich and clear. 
The girl thought as she looked into the up- 
turned face, that she had never seen such 
eager, appealing eyes. 

“You can’t read?” Beatrice exclaimed, for- 
getting politeness in her surprise. 

“My own language, Finnish, yes, but not 
yours. My boy, Olaf, made me learn to talk 
English plain, but I was always so busy with 
my two hands I could not learn to read or 
write. Bead, read, please, before it is too 
dark to see the letter.” 

Beatrice spread out the paper on the pom- 
mel of the saddle. 

“Why,” she said, glancing at the date, “it 
is nearly a year old!” 

“Yes,” returned the woman nodding heavily, 
23 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“ten months ago he wrote it from his ship 
in Marseilles. I have nearly worn it out 
carrying it around and having it read to me. 
But it is only kind people I ask to read it now, 
for some begin to say, ‘Like father, like son; 
your Olaf will never come back.” 

“Was his father a sailor too?” the girl 
asked. 

“Yes, but he sailed away from our home in 
Finland when our boy was only a month old, 
and I never heard from him again. It was 
nearly a year later that we learned how his ship 
had been wrecked on the voyage to Japan. I 
brought my boy to this country then where I 
could support him better, and what a credit and 
a comfort to me he was. He was wild to go 
in the navy when the war began, but he was 
just too young; so it was not till last year that 
he slipped away, as I had always feared he 
would. He hardly even said good-by to me, 
and this is my only letter from him. But I 
talk too long; you will not be able to see.” 

24 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


Once more Beatrice turned to the paper 
and began: 

“My dear mother : I expect you think I am 
never going to send you a letter — ” 

She read through to the end, thinking that it 
sounded affectionate but contained little news 
beyond the fact that the writer was going to 
China. 

“He gives an address to send an answer,” 
she observed as she folded the letter and handed 
it back. “What did you write to him?” 

To her surprise she saw big tears stand 
suddenly in Christina’s eyes. 

“Ah, Thorvik would not let me, and I 
couldn’t write myself,” she said. “And my 
Olaf is such an American, he cannot read my 
language. That is perhaps why he has not 
written again and has not come home.” 

Then, seeing Beatrice’s puzzled look, she ex- 
plained more fully, although it was difficult to 
make plain her foreign notion that women are 
subject to the men in their houses. 

25 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“Thorvik is my brother, once a good Finn 
like myself, but now — oh, so different. He 
was to come to America some years ago, but 
he war broke out over here and he went, in- 
stead into the Russian army. Now that there 
is peace he has come to us, but how that time 
had changed him! He is full of wild talk of 
revolution, and tyrants and destroying every 
thing. He and Olaf never agreed. It was 
what made my boy unhappy at home, and, 
though I did what I could, Olaf went away 
from us at last.” 

Beatrice leaned forward in her saddle with 
sudden interest. 

“Do you live in a little cottage half-way up 
the hill above Ely? That man I saw there 
when I rode by — is that your brother?” 

Christina nodded. 

“And if you could write to your son,” the 
girl pursued, “what would you say?” 

“I would say, ‘Come home,’ ” cried Chris- 
tina. “Over and over I would say, ‘Come 
26 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


home. If it is only for a week or a day be- 
tween voyages/ I would say, 'come still, no 
matter what happened before you went 
away.’ ” 

Beatrice felt in the pocket of her riding 
skirt. There were a note-book and pencil 
there, she felt sure, for she had made a list of 
supplies to be bought in the village before she 
set out on her ride. 

“Do you want me to put down the address 
and write to your son for you?” she offered. 

“Oh, if you would!” cried Christina. “And 
you would never tell Thorvik?” 

“There is no danger of that,” Beatrice as- 
sured her. “And I think somehow that your 
boy will come back.” 

She could not tell, herself, what made her 
offer such a definite opinion. 

There was something she liked about the 
words of the letter. “I went ashore at Mar- 
seilles, and it is such a strange place that be- 
fore I had been there an hour I wanted to 
27 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


stay a year. But loafing does n’t suit me, so 
I am off again for Hong-Kong, but I ’ll not 
forget you, Mother, not even on the other side 
of the world.” 

She folded the worn page once again, gave it 
to Christina, and rode on. To her own sur- 
prise, she had that pleasant, satisfied feeling, 
that comes with the making of a new friend. 
After a few rods, she turned to look back and 
saw the Finnish woman still looking after her. 
Beatrice raised her hand in a quick gesture of 
leave-taking. It was a slight move but it had 
important consequences, since it seemed to ce- 
ment their regard for each other and to streng- 
then Christina in a wavering resolution. She 
came swiftly down the road, calling in her 
clear, full voice : 

“Stop, I must tell you something.” 

When she came to Buck’s side she began 
with quick questioning that would have 
sounded impertinent, had it not been so earn- 
est. 


28 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 

“Why did you come here, to Ely? How 
long are you going to stay?” 

Briefly Beatrice explained about her aunt’s 
health and the arrangements her father had 
made. 

“I believe Aunt Anna wanted to come be- 
cause she had been here once before,” she con- 
cluded rather vaguely. “I don’t seem to re- 
member if she told me when or why she came.” 

“The place has changed since she was here, 
even since your father was here.” Christina 
declared. “There is a whole army of foreign 
laborers, Slavs, Poles, what the men call Bo- 
hunks, working on this irrigation project to 
water the valley. There is a strike brewing. 
Ah, do I not know? My brother Thorvik 
talks of nothing else. It is he who urges them 
on. When such a thing breaks out, Ely will 
not be a good place for you and your aunt and 
your sister.” 

“But strikes mean just parades and people 
carrying banners and talking on street-corn- 
29 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


ers,” Beatrice protested. She had seen indus- 
trial unrest at home and had thought very lit- 
tle of it. What she did fear was the long jour- 
ney which had been so difficult for her aunt 
and which it seemed impossible to face soon 
again. 

“Strikes are not the same in the West. 
Men carry something besides banners in the 
parades, and talking on street-corners ends in 
fights. You had better take your aunt away.” 

“It does not seem possible,” Beatrice replied, 
“but thank you for telling me.” Again she 
said good-by and rode on, feeling only a lit- 
tle uneasy, for, she reflected, “To live with a 
man like that brother would make any one 
think that things were going wrong.” 

There were lamps showing in some of the 
windows of the village, as she rode clattering 
up the street, and streaks of light dropping 
through the rickety shutters of a big, ram- 
shackle building in the center of the town. A 
30 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 

stream of men was moving up the steps of this 
place, which seemed, as its door swung open, 
to be a public meeting hall. Its benches were 
crowded with rough-looking men, and some- 
one on a platform at the far end was address- 
ing the close-packed audience. She turned 
Buck loose at her own door to find his way 
home, as she had been instructed by Dan O’ 
Leary. Then, tired, stiff, and with much to 
tell, she hurried into the house. 

Dinner that night, in the candle-lit dining- 
room with the noiseless Chinaman serving them 
delicious food, was very welcome to the hungry 
Beatrice. Aunt Anna, looking very frail and 
weary, but still able to sit up in her cushioned 
chair, was at the head of the table, with one 
tall chestnut-haired niece at her right and with 
the other, the younger one, the pink and plump 
Nancy who was always laughing and nearly 
always asking questions, sitting at her left. 

“Joe Ling is a good cook,” observed Bea- 
31 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


trice with satisfaction, when their white- jack- 
eted chef had gone into the kitchen for the 
dessert. 

“Yes, but he would n’t let me come into the 
kitchen to get Aunt Anna a glass of milk ; and 
when I told him about the broth she needed, I 
could n’t make out whether he heard or not, 
for he paid no attention at all. I don’t think 
I understand Chinamen. Their faces don’t 
change, you can’t tell what they are thinking 
about, and they look as though they knew 
everything in the world.” 

Nancy sighed as she spoke, for she had un- 
dertaken the housekeeping, since she had more 
domestic tastes than her sister. The new and 
strange difficulties in this establishment in 
Ely were, however, sometimes rather appal- 
ling. 

Aunt Anna said very little; she seemed to 
have small appetite and to be too tired to 
talk. After dinner Nancy went out to give 
orders for breakfast, but she came in again 
32 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


looking much discouraged. It seemed impos- 
sible for her to get used to Joe Ling with 
his mask-like face and silent Oriental man- 
ners. 

The next day Nancy was to try the new 
horse; but she was not so good a rider as Bea- 
trice, and the astute Buck, guessing that fact 
at once, took liberties with her that she did 
not enjoy. She gave her sister a lively ac- 
count of her misadventures in the evening when 
they were going to bed. 

“I wanted to ride up to your cabin, but 
Buck had other plans. I saw most of the 
town and part of this end of the valley and 
then the pony decided to take me home. Some 
workmen, coming in from the place where they 
are digging that big ditch, scowled and stared 
at me and I did n’t like it. I sometimes won- 
der a little why Aunt Anna wanted to come 
here.” 

“Who was with her when she was here long 
ago?” Beatrice asked. “It seems to me that 
33 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


I heard her talking of it to dad, and that she 
said something about her — her brother.” 

“Her brother — why, she has n’t any but our 
father,” objected Nancy. “If she had one he 
would be our uncle, and we would know him. 
It couldn’t be!” 

Beatrice was thinking so deeply that she 
paused in brushing her hair. 

“It does seem as though I remembered 
about some such person, oh, a very long time 
ago when we were little. It was some one 
younger than father or Aunt Anna, with yel- 
low hair like hers. He used to come up to the 
nursery to play with us, and then all of a sud- 
den he didn’t come any more and no one 
talked about him, so I just forgot.” 

“It is very puzzling,” returned Nancy. 
“Perhaps we might write home about it, but 
it would never do to worry Aunt Anna with 
asking her. Meanwhile we will sleep on it, 
for it is time to go to bed.” 

Sleeping on it, however, was the one thing 
3 4 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


that they did not do. Nancy had put out the 
light and was putting up the curtains when 
she aroused her drowsy sister with a sudden 
cry: 

“O, Beatrice, come here and look.” 

They stood together at the open window, 
startled and terrified by what they saw. The 
big hall in the next block was plainly visible, 
with its shutters down and its door wide open, 
as though the air within had become close 
and stifling beyond endurance. The place 
was still packed with men, but no orderly 
company now. They were all standing, 
some of them had climbed upon the benches, 
and every one seemed to be shouting at once. 
In the depths of the building, almost beyond 
where they could see, somebody was waving 
a red flag. Presently a group of men came 
rushing down the steps, then more and more, 
until the street was filled with an irregular, 
shouting throng, waving hats, bandannas, and 
banners and shrieking together, so many of 
35 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


them in foreign tongues that it was impossible 
to guess what they said. 

“It is the strike,” Nancy gasped. “Chris- 
tina did not tell you it would begin so soon or 
be so — so terrible.” 

“That man walking at the head of them 
all is her brother Thorvik,” said Beatrice. “I 
wonder where they are going and what they 
mean to do.” 

They lingered at the open window until 
Nancy, sniffing suddenly, declared, “I smell 
smoke.” 

Before Beatrice could answer, they heard in 
the next room the voice of Aunt Anna, who 
had been awakened by the uproar. 

“It is just a public meeting breaking up,” 
Beatrice reassured her, although the sharp 
smell of burning wood began to fill the room 
as the blue smoke drifted in at the window. 
The girls were about to go on with some expla- 
nation when Nancy caught her sister’s arm 
and, by a sign, made her look out. 

36 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


The side door, just below them, was open- 
ing and closing silently, to allow the passing 
of a stealthy figure. Joe Ling, with a pole 
balanced over his shoulder and at either end 
of it a heavy basket, was slipping away into the 
dark with that short-stepping trot of a hurried 
Chinaman. He had brought those same bas- 
kets, containing all his worldly possessions, to 
their house three days before. It was plain 
that he not only considered his term of em- 
ployment with them at an end but that he was 
about to shake the dust of Ely from his silent, 
Chinese-slippered feet. 

“And ought n’t we to go too?” Beatrice won- 
dered desperately. 

She looked at Aunt Anna, thin, weak, and ex- 
hausted* lying on the bed. She heard out- 
side the crash of falling timbers and a great 
shout as a shower of red sparks went sailing 
past the window. A moment later there came 
a violent knocking at the door. 

Was it Christina she wondered as she ran 
37 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


down the stairs, or had some of those shout- 
ing men ? 

She called softly before she dared draw the 
bolt, and was relieved to hear the sound of 
a woman’s voice. Christina stood on the thres- 
hold, and with her Dan O’Leary’s helper at 
the livery-stable, Sam. 

“Things have broken loose quicker than we 
thought,” the woman began quickly, since there 
was no need for explanations with that red flare 
lighting up the whole village. “The men are 
burning the empty warehouse, just to show 
what devilment is in them. With this wind 
the whole town may catch and they don’t care. 
You and your aunt must get away as quickly 
as you can. There is a train goes through in 
less than half an hour, so you must hurry. 
We couldn’t find Dan, but Sam here has 
hitched up and will take you down.” 

“We will go at once,” Beatrice agreed, be- 
ginning to gather up their possessions in the 
living-room and to make ready for a hasty 
38 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 


packing. In the midst of her wild prepara- 
tions, however, there was a step on the stair 
and Aunt Anna came slowly down, looking 
very white and frightened. 

‘‘What is all this? What are you doing?” 
she questioned and, from the combined expla- 
nations of Christina, Sam, and her nieces, all 
given at once, she seemed somehow to divine 
what had happened. 

“There are only twenty minutes now,” Bea- 
trice urged. “We must be quick.” But Aunt 
Anna did not move. 

“You may take the girls to the station,” 
she said to Sam. “They can travel back alone, 
but I am not going.” 

“But you must,” cried Beatrice desperately. 
“You will not be safe. You can never get 
well in a tumult like this.” 

Aunt Anna gave her a strange look. 

“I did not come here to get well,” she said. 
“I came for something very different. And I 
am not going back.” 


39 ' 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


She swayed — caught at the railing, too faint 
and ill to argue further. Nancy ran to help 
her but she still struggled to make them under- 
stand. She sent Beatrice a desperate, implor- 
ing glance and strove to speak again, but 
no words would come. 

“You must make her go,” insisted Chris- 
tina. “Sam can lift her on the train. She 
will thank you in the end.” 

Beatrice shook her head. 

“I don’t understand at all why she wants to 
stay,” she said, “but stay she shall. There is 
only one other thing to do. We will go to the 
cabin up on the mountain. Sam, can you get 
the keys from Dan O’Leary’s house? The 
place has been used lately, and it is safe from 
this fire, at least. Nancy, pack Aunt Anna’s 
things and I will gather up the rest. We 
can’t start too soon.” 

Half an hour later the rickety old carriage 
was groaning and lurching up the mountain 
road. No one said a word as they climbed 
40 


THE DEPARTURE OF JOE LING 

steadily upward. Beatrice, looking back, saw 
the red flames still leaping madly, still heard, 
though faintly, the shouts of the men as they 
ran here and there to bring fresh fuel to the 
fire. The responsibility of choice had in the 
end rested upon her; it would be her part to 
make life in the mountain cabin possible. 
Could she do it? Had she chosen well? 
They came into the shadow of the forest, and, 
in the stillness, following the uproar below, 
they heard the weird yapping of a coyote 
somewhere in the hills. 


41 


CHAPTER III 


NEIGHBORS 

( T\0 you remember,” said Nancy, as she 
1 9 and Beatrice viewed each other across a 
wilderness of overflowing trunks, half-un- 
packed boxes of bedding, baskets of china, 
and packages of groceries, “do you remember 
how that Englishman at your sorority dance 
used to talk about an affair like this as ‘set- 
tling in’ ? Settling would n’t be so hard, but 
settling in! Will all this stuff ever go inside 
this house?” 

“I don’t know,” replied Beatrice abstract- 
edly. “It will have to go in somehow. Surely 
we need everything that is here.” 

She spoke absently, for the mention of the 
dance had brought a sudden flood of memories 
and of odd fancies. It had been the last one 
42 


NEIGHBORS 


she had attended before the doctor’s verdict 
concerning Aunt Anna’s health, which had up- 
set all their plans and driven them West. It 
must have been in another world, she thought, 
that evening at the countiy club with the moon- 
light coming in on the polished floor, with the 
whirling maze of colored dresses, the swinging 
music, and the soft sound of multitudes of 
sliding feet. She stepped out upon the stone 
doorstep, and looked down between the giant 
red trunks of the pine-trees down upon the 
white thread of road winding to the valley, 
upon the huddle of box-like houses, with the 
slow smoke rising from the blackened ruins in 
the midst. 

A wave of panic seized her. Would she 
know how to manage affairs in this strange 
new world, this place of rugged, lonely peaks, 
pine-forested mountainsides, of narrow val- 
leys filled with rioting men? Yet panic was 
followed by sudden exhilaration, born, per- 
haps, of the strange clearness of the thin air 
43 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


and the brilliance of the morning sunshine. 
She remembered the dance again, how she had 
been manager of it and how the evening had 
been full of congratulations on the success of 
her arrangements. Yet in the midst of it she 
had felt a vague discontent, a sudden wonder 
whether this was all the pleasure that life had 
to offer. Well, she thought now, with a long 
breath of fresh, sparkling air, if she could hold 
her own in that world, she could in this also, 
and she returned to her work. 

Nancy, quite untroubled by any doubts or 
fancies, was plodding steadily ahead at the task 
in hand. It had been no hardship for her to 
arise early, explore the possibilities of the kit- 
*chen, concoct a breakfast out of such supplies 
as they had brought with them, and carry it 
in on a tray with a beaming and triumphant 
smile. 

Aunt Anna seemed to have suffered little 
harm from the midnight flitting, and was sleep - 
44 


NEIGHBORS 


ing late after the excitements of the night be- 
fore. She had been made comfortable at once 
in the one room that was in tolerable order; 
for the girls had only to make up the couch 
with the bedding they had brought, to build 
a fire out of the pine cones that lay so thickly 
under the trees, and the apartment was ready 
for the invalid. Christina had taken charge 
of the place for the former occupants, and had 
left it very clean and in order. In the dry 
Montana air, no house, even when closed for 
months, grows damp, nor, in the clean pine 
woods, even very dusty. Aunt Anna had re- 
mained long awake, however; for, two hours 
later when it was almost dawn, Beatrice had 
stolen in and found her staring wide-eyed at 
the fire. 

“Can I do anything for you? Aren’t you 
very tired?” the girl had asked, but her aunt 
only smiled and shook her head. 

“I am very comfortable,” she said. “I think 
45 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


we are going to be very happy in this strange 
little house. I am glad you had the courage 
to bring me here, my child.” 

Beatrice stood beside the bed and straight- 
ened the coverlid. 

“Won’t you tell me why you wanted so much 
to stay?” she begged. “I wish I might know.” 

Her aunt did not answer for a moment. 

“I used to think,” she said at last, that you 
might never know, but perhaps, since last night, 
I have changed my mind. Yes, whatever hap- 
pens, I believe I will tell you, but not just 
now; for I am too weary to go through with 
such a thing. Move my pillow a little, my dear ; 
I am going to sleep. The music of that water- 
fall would make anybody drowsy.” 

Before they had finished breakfast, Chris- 
tina had appeared, with Sam, heavy-laden, fol- 
lowing her, bringing more of their things from 
the village. 

“I just packed everything that I thought 
you would need and had Sam fetch it up,” said 
46 


NEIGHBORS 


Christina. “No, you can’t go down to the 
town until things have quieted a little. There 
was fighting last night, and Dan O’Leary has 
been shot.” 

“ J ust through the leg,” Sam reassured them, 
seeing Nancy’s horrified face. “Dan has been 
foreman of one of the ditching gangs, but he 
owns the livery-stable and one of the stores, so 
being a property holder makes him more care- 
ful than the rest. He ’s hot-headed enough, 
though, and was leader of all the workmen 
until this fellow out of Russia, Thorvik, came 
to town. He goes Dan one better, and there 
is no knowing what he won’t stir up.” 

“Is the strike going to last long?” Beatrice 
asked. 

Sam chuckled. 

“It’s not a strike; that’s just where the 
pinch is. While they were holding their meet- 
ing last night, and arguing about how soon 
they should quit, there comes word from the 
company that the work is shut down until 

m 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


further notice. Something has gone wrong 
with the money end of the business, people 
say, and there ’s nothing to go on with. Any- 
way, there ’s no strike; the men higher up beat 
them to it. Christina is right. The City of 
Ely is no place for young ladies to be going 
just now.” 

He carried in the boxes and went down the 
path for more. 

“There ’s room in the shed for your horse, 
Miss Beatrice,” he announced, when he had 
made his last trip. “I can bring him up if 
you like, only you would have to take care of 
him yourself. We can haul up enough feed to 
keep him, and there ’s some grazing land higher 
up the hill.” 

Accordingly it was settled that Buck, also, 
was to be a part of their establishment, al- 
though Beatrice felt a little appalled at the 
prospect of taking care of a horse single- 
handed. 

“Bless you, he ’s that wise he can almost take 
48 


NEIGHBORS 


care of himself,” Sam reassured her. “He ’s 
a little light on his feet when you go to saddle 
him, but beyond that he hasn’t a fault. It 
will be a good thing to have a horse on the 
place.” 

Toward noon the two girls, with Christina’s 
assistance, began to bring some order out of 
the confusion. The cabin possessed four 
rooms downstairs; the large living-room, into 
which the front door opened; the bedroom off 
it; the lean-to kitchen; and, wonder of won- 
Jers, a tiny bath-room with a shining white por- 
celain tub. 

“Those engineers who used the place just 
settled down to make themselves comfortable,” 
Christina explained. “They put in the water- 
pipes themselves, and I ’ll never forget the day 
they brought up that tub, packed on a mule. 
He bucked it off once and it slid down the 
hill until it caught between two pine-trees.” 

The enterprising former tenants had also in- 
troduced electricity from the power plant of 
49 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the nearest mine, so that the two most diffi- 
cult housekeeping problems of water and 
light were thus already solved. The heavy ta- 
ble and straight clumsy chairs must also have 
been brought there by their predecessors, and 
the bunks in the two little rooms under the 
roof must have been their work. The men had 
evidently slept on pine branches; but for the 
girls Sam brought mattresses from the house 
in the village and a comfortable bed for Aunt 
Anna. 

“Now/’ said Nancy at last, “we have every- 
thing we need except milk and eggs.” 

“I believe,” said Christina, who was scrub- 
bing the big table, “that over at John Herrick’s 
- — he ’s your nearest neighbor — they could 
spare you what milk and eggs you want. I 
know they have a cow and that his girl, Hes- 
ter, makes a great deal of her chickens!” 

Neighbors! Beatrice had forgotten that 
house, nearly hidden by the shoulder of the 
mountain, but visible from the trail below. 

50 


NEIGHBORS 


There was a girl there, too, perhaps of their 
own age. She was eager to go and investi- 
gate at once and scarcely waited to hear how 
to find the way. 

It was a long walk down to the road beyond 
the bars and then up the hill to the next house. 
Beatrice realized, as she tramped along, that 
distances are deceitful in high altitudes and 
that the presence of Buck would be a great 
convenience. The house, when she reached it, 
was even larger than she had thought — a long, 
low dwelling, with a row of sheds and stables 
and an enclosed corral! She had just reached 
the front steps when she saw the door fly open 
and a brown-haired girl, with very bright, 
dancing eyes, come running out in a flutter of 
dark curls and flying blue and white skirts. 

“Oh, oh!” cried Hester Herrick, grasping 
Beatrice’s hand in her cordial brown one. “I 
thought there was smoke in your chimney and 
I could n’t wait to know who was living in the 
cabin. To have neighbors — you can’t think 
51 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


what it means on this mountain! Come in, 
come in.” 

To Beatrice, who had observed with some 
distaste the flimsy houses of the village, the sag- 
ging board walks and streets full of ruts and 
boulders, this place was a delightful surprise, 
with its air of spruce neatness and picturesque 
charm. She liked the outside of the building, 
the pointed gables and wide eaves ; but, as Hes- 
ter conducted her within, she gave a little gasp 
of wonder, for the house was really beautiful 
inside. Beauty in a house, to her, had always 
meant shining white woodwork, softly col- 
ored rugs, and polished mahogany, but there 
was nothing of all that here. The low room 
with its windows opening toward the distant 
mountains, was full of rich colors, the dull red 
of the unceiled pine walls and bookcases, the 
odd browns and yellows in the bearskin rugs, 
the clear flame-color of the bowl of wild lilies 
that stood on the broad window-sill. Hester 
52 


NEIGHBORS 


seated her guest in the corner of a huge com- 
fortable couch and sat down beside her with a 
smile of broad satisfaction. 

It was difficult to bring up such a prosaic 
subject as milk and eggs in such pleasant sur- 
roundings ; but when that had been disposed of, 
the two were soon chattering as though they 
had known each other for years. 

“Yes,” commented Hester, nodding sagely, 
as she heard the tale of their departure for 
the cabin on the hill, “there is going to be real 
trouble in Ely, so Roddy says, and he won’t 
let me go down there just now. How glad I 
am that you did n’t go away !” 

Beatrice’s eyes had been roving about the 
room, observing the white birch log on the 
hearth, the tawny-orange shade of the home- 
spun curtains, and even the pictures on the 
wall. 

“Why,” she exclaimed, her glance arrested 
by a photograph hanging near the window, 
53 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“we have that same picture at home, in my 
father’s study. It is of the school where he 
used to go.” 

Hester looked up at the vine-covered arch- 
way showing a tree-lined walk beyond. 

“I don’t know where Roddy got it,” she 
said. “It has always been there, over his desk, 
for as long as I can remember.” 

“Who is Roddy, your brother?” Beatrice 
asked. 

“No, he is my — my sort of father, but not 
really. He is too young to be my father, I sup- 
pose. He adopted me when I was very little. 
His name is John Rodman Herrick, so, as 
he ’s only fifteen years older, I call him Roddy. 
I can’t remember when I didn’t live in 
this house with him, and with old Julia and 
her husband Tim, to do the work for us. 
There is Roddy now.” 

The stride of heavy boots sounded along the 
veranda, and a man came in, a handsome vigor- 
ous person who, as Hester had said, looked too 
54 


NEIGHBORS 


young to be her father. Nor were they the 
least alike in appearance, since he was very 
fair, with thick, light hair and blue eyes that 
contrasted oddly with his very sunburnt skin. 
He wore ordinary riding clothes, but seemed 
to carry an air of distinction in his clean-cut 
profile and straight shoulders. 

He listened to Hester’s rather confused ac- 
count of Beatrice’s arrival and shook hands 
with her gravely. 

“Are you going to be comfortable in the 
cabin?” he asked. “Who is helping you get 
settled?” 

“There is a Finnish woman who is doing 
everything for us,” Beatrice told him. “I 
have never seen any one who worked so hard.” 

She told how she had first met Christina in 
the wood, and what gratitude and assistance 
the woman had given them later. 

“Poor Christina, she can never put that boy 
out of her mind,” John Herrick said. “He 
was a good fellow, Olaf Jensen, and I have 
55 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


missed him since he left Ely. He was always 
in some mischief or other and his last escapade 
before he went to sea came near to being seri- 
ous. There are still men in the village telling 
what they will do to him when he comes back.” 

“What was it he did?” Beatrice asked. 

John Herrick began to laugh. 

“Olaf was working with one of our ditching 
gangs, and a good workman he was. Sud- 
denly, one day while they were digging near 
the river, Olaf pointed to a high rock opposite, 
called Mason’s Bluff, a well-known and dan- 
gerous place. There seemed to be a man hang- 
ing by a rope halfway down the face of it, un- 
able, apparently, to get either up or down. 
The laborers didn’t take much interest — said 
any one was a fool who would try such a climb ; 
and not one of them would budge an inch to 
help him. Then Olaf remarked casually, ‘It 
must be that scientist fellow who was in our 
camp yesterday. Do you remember that rich 
tenderfoot who went around spending money 
56 


NEIGHBORS 


and tapping rocks?’ Every man dropped his 
tools, for if there is a chance for a reward these 
Bohunks are on the job at once. You should 
have seen them scurrying down to the river, 
getting across any way they could, and run- 
ning like rabbits through the brush, each one 
determined to be first on the spot.” 

“And did they save him?” Beatrice inquired 
eagerly. 

“The first ones were within a hundred yards 
when the man fell.” 

She gasped, but he went on with a dry 
chuckle. 

“They went nearer to pick him up and found 
he was a dummy man, stuffed with straw. 
Then they remembered that Olaf had been 
laughing at them for being willing to do any- 
thing for money and nothing without it, and 
they came back to camp vowing to have his 
blood. Even I was surprised at what an ugly 
temper they showed, but Olaf was wise enough 
to know how they would feel, and when they 
57 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

came back he was gone. Probably he meant 
to go anyway and wanted to have one final 
fling.” 

Beatrice, glancing at the clock, was horri- 
fied to see how long she had stayed and rose 
at once to go. Both her new friends came to 
the door with her. 

“By the way,” said John Herrick as Bea- 
trice stood on the step below, “my Hester is 
too informal a person for introductions, and 
she has not even told me your name. Indeed, 
I doubt if she knows it herself. Won’t you 
tell us who you are and who is at the cabin 
with you?” 

What a cordial, friendly smile, he had, Bea- 
trice thought, and how it lighted his brown 
face! 

“My Aunt Anna and my sister Nancy are 
at the cottage with me,” she said. “The place 
is mine; my father gave it to me. My name 
is Beatrice Deems.” 

Never had she seen a countenance change so 
58 


NEIGHBORS 


abruptly as did John Herrick’s as he turned 
suddenly and went into the house, leaving 
Hester to say her good-byes alone. 

It was at the end of a very laborious but 
satisfactory day that Nancy came up to her sis- 
ter’s room to find Beatrice writing at the 
rough pine table. 

“Everything is in order, and Christina and 
Sam have just gone,” said Nancy. ‘ 'There 
was n’t anything more you wanted them to do, 
was there?” 

“Oh, I wanted them to mail my letters,” ex- 
claimed Beatrice, seizing her envelopes and 
jumping up. “It took me so long to write 
everything to dad that I only just finished 
this one that I promised Christina for her boy, 
Olaf. Perhaps I can catch Sam at the gate.” 

She sped down the path through the pines 
and was able to overtake Christina and Sam 
where they had paused to put up the bars. 
Beatrice was just explaining to the Finnish 
woman what she had written, when a heavy 
59 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

slouching figure came up the road through the 
shadows and Thorvik, in his broken English, 
addressed his sister roughly. 

“You spend the whole day here — spend the 
night too? I have not yet my supper!” 

It was evident that he wished Beatrice, also, 
to know of his displeasure, or he would have 
used his own tongue. He grasped Christina 
angrily by the arm and shot the girl a scowl- 
ing glance of such fierce enmity that involun- 
tarily she shrank back behind the gate. It was 
difficult, under that frowning scrutiny, to hand 
the two letters to Sam, — the more so since 
Christina eyed one of the envelopes with such 
nervous apprehension. Even a duller eye 
than Thorvik’s might have noted that the let- 
was of special importance to her. 

The sullen animosity deepened on the man’s 
face. 

“You make nothing more with my sister; 
see?” he said, as he led Christina away. 

Sam nodded a subdued good night, clucked 
60 


NEIGHBORS 


low-spiritedly to his horses, and drove slowly 
after the two. Even his unquenched cheerful- 
ness seemed affected by instinctive dread of 
Thorvik’s sour ill-temper. Nor was it with 
a very cheerful heart that Beatrice walked back 
alone up the path. It rendered her task of 
living by no means easier to realize that she 
had made an enemy of such a man as Thorvik. 
Yet the light from her cabin, shining small 
and yellow beneath the giant pines, seemed 
somehow to rekindle her failing courage. 
Those two dearly loved people were there 
within, Nancy and Aunt Anna. Surely the 
way would be shown to her to care for them 
and keep them safe. 


61 


CHAPTER IV 


a 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 

I T was a week later and Beatrice, with a 
landscape of blue mountains and green 
forest showing beyond her through the open 
door, was standing on the threshold in her rid- 
ing clothes. 

“I have finished my share of the housework 
and I am off for a ride,” she said to Nancy. 
Her sister smiled broadly over her dusting. 
“I would never have thought,” she declared, 
“that you could curry a horse and split the 
kindling before breakfast and that I could 
scrub floors and wash dishes every day and 
that we both of us would like it. There 
must be something strange in this mountain 
air.” 

They had begun to feel as settled as though 
62 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


they had been at their housekeeping in the 
cabin for months. The cottage itself was a dif- 
ferent place, an entrancingly pleasant and com- 
fortable one. Hester Herrick, with whom 
they were now great friends, was always bring- 
ing them things — some big black andirons 
for the great fireplace, a collection of soft 
pine pillows, and the thick bearskin rug that 
lay before the hearth. 

“Roddy said you were to have it. He shot 
the bear himself last winter,” she said when the 
girls protested that this last gift was too great 
a one. 

Sam also had brought a bashfully presented 
offering, the pelt of a mountain lion which now 
served as Aunt Anna’s bedside rug. Nancy 
had put up white blue-bordered curtains at 
the little square windows and had set on the 
wide sills pots of red berries, boxes of ferns, 
and bowls of bright-faced pansies. 

With the fresh wind fluttering the curtains 
and the sunshine lying in patches on the white 
63 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


scrubbed floor, the little cabin was as gay and 
homelike a place as heart could desire. 

Christina, in spite of Thorvik’s interdiction, 
still came every day. This morning she ar- 
rived earlier than usual, with their marketing 
in a big basket and the mail; for it was not, 
even yet, a good thing for the girls to go often 
to the village. She took some letters in to 
their Aunt Anna and remained for some time, 
since Aunt Anna appeared to be asking her 
questions. 

“No,” the girls heard Christina say, through 
the door, “there is no one of your name here- 
abouts. But Olaf and I have only lived in 
this valley ten years, so it might have been 
before.” 

Beatrice looked up, startled. What had her 
aunt been asking and why should there be any 
one of their name living in this far-off place? 
She remembered her former wonder concern- 
ing that brother of whom they never heard 
anything at home. But Christina came out 
64 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


and closed the door, the bright morning was 
calling, and Beatrice forgot her curiosity in 
looking forward to her ride. 

“Don’t you want to go, Nancy?” she said as 
she went through the kitchen. 

“No,” returned Nancy briskly, “I don’t care 
for riding as you do, and this morning I 
would not go for anything. Christina is go- 
ing to teach me how to make bread.” The 
exploration of strange forests and dizzy moun- 
tainsides was nothing to Nancy, compared with 
the excitement of cooking something new. 

To saddle Buck was now a less difficult af- 
fair than at first, for his mistress had learned 
to fling the object of his hatred upon him and 
then stand back, giving adroit jerks at the 
cinch between his kicks and plunges. When 
he had got his fill of bucking he would turn 
his white face to her as if to say. “That is all 
for to-day; now let ’s be off.” 

Her expedition was doomed to delay, how- 
ever, for, as she was leading her pony around 
65 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

the corner of the house, she came upon a visi- 
tor, a total stranger, standing on the doorstep. 
He was apparently annoyed at finding no door- 
bell and having his knock go unheard. He 
shuffled his feet, coughed, and rapped smartly 
on the door again and again, as though he 
were a person of such importance that he 
could not afford to be kept waiting. Beatrice 
realized suddenly how used she had become to 
Ely’s conventional costume of flannel shirt and 
high boots, since this dapper newcomer, with 
his pointed shoes and tight, high-waisted coat 
looked not only uncomfortable, but absurd. 

“Good morning, Miss Deems. Beautiful 
day, is it not?” began the stranger easily. 
“Mills is my name, Dabney Mills of the 
Brownsville, Montana ‘Evening Star.’ My pa- 
per has sent me here, or rather I volunteered 
to come, to investigate this unfortunate affair 
going on in Broken Bow Valley.” 

“Oh, you mean the strike?” Beatrice asked, 
rather bewildered and not knowing at all why 
66 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


the overdressed Mr. Mills should have sought 
out their remote cabin. 

He made a movement as though to go in, 
but, since Beatrice seemed not at all inclined 
to open the door, he sat down on the step with 
smooth assurance, laid his hat on the stone, and 
took out a note-book. 

“The affair is more like a lockout than a 
strike, but not exactly that, either,” he con- 
tinued with that irresistible fluency of speech 
adopted by people who talk a great deal to un- 
willing listeners. “As I understand it, the 
situation is this. The Broken Bow Irrigation 
Co. undertakes to construct the necessary 
dams, ditches, and sluice-gates to water this 
dry valley, a big project in which a certain 
John Herrick, resident of these parts, has large 
interests.” 

“I did not know about John Herrick’s share 
in it,” Beatrice said. She was beginning al- 
ready to catch the Western habit of dropping 
the title “mister” except in direct address. 

67 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


Since she was unwilling that the stranger 
should come in, for fear he would disturb and 
annoy Aunt Anna, and since he made no move 
to go away, she finally sat down herself upon 
the step. 

“The money for this affair,” Mills went on, 
“was raised in part, as is usual, by the owners 
of the land which is to be irrigated, but the 
greater amount was to be subscribed by capi- 
talists outside the valley, John Herrick pledg- 
ing himself to see that the necessary sum was 
forthcoming. So far, so good.” He tapped 
the note-book with a stubby forefinger and 
went on with significant emphasis. “Since 
there is no bank in Ely, there are often large 
sums in currency brought to pay the men and 
deposited in the Irrigation Company’s safe. 
It is known that, just before this outbreak, the 
finances of the company were in good condi- 
tion and that there was no talk of funds giv- 
ing out before the work was completed. Yet 
when the men held a meeting to debate whether 
68 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


they should go on or should strike for increased 
wages — they had already had one increase but 
Thorvik insisted it was not enough, — they 
were served with a notice that the capital was 
exhausted and that construction was shut 
down. That is what all the trouble is about.” 

He looked at Beatrice very wisely, but she 
said nothing. She was aware of Nancy stand- 
ing in the door and looking at Dabney Mills’ 
back in round-eyed astonishment. She called 
her sister out finally, and introduced the new- 
comer stiffly, and motioned Nancy to sit beside 
her. 

“Yes, sir, the money was gone!” The pol- 
ished manner of Mills’ narrative dropped sud- 
denly into the colloquial, as though the effort 
had been too much for him. “The men mob- 
bed the office building demanding to know what 
had happened, and the officers of the unions 
were allowed to examine the books and even 
to look into the safe, but it was plain to them 
all that the company could n’t turn up a red 
69 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


cent. Been stolen, so people begin to say, but 
no one knows who did it. Now the men are 
lounging around town, idle, quarreling, look- 
ing for trouble. Not a wheel can turn until 
the money is found.” 

Nancy looked at him with inquisitive inter- 
est. 

“And did you come to Ely to find it?” she 
asked. 

“Well — why, if you put it that way, I guess I 
did,” he answered, reddening a little, but seem- 
ing flattered, on the whole, by the bluntness of 
her question. “I told the editor of my paper 
that it would make a big story if any one could 
find out just who made way with that money. 
He did n’t think a cub reporter could do much, 
but I offered to come up here on my own re- 
sponsibility and get to the bottom of the whole 
affair. It will be a smashing big hit for me 
if I make good.” 

He opened his note-book and fluttered over 
the leaves. 


70 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


“Of course the sheriff is working on the job, 
but these country officials are no sleuths. It 
will take a smarter man than he is to get any- 
where. I ’m on my way up to interview John 
Herrick ; he ’s the big man of the company and 
he ought to be able to give me something. But 
in case he won’t talk I thought I would stop 
and learn what I could from his neighbors, I 
understand you know Miss Herrick well. 
Now anything you can tell me will be useful. 
What do you know of John Herrick or his 
habits or his business?” 

He waited with pencil poised. 

“We don’t know anything, and we would n’t 
tell you if we did,” cried Nancy indignantly. 

“It isn’t hard usually to find out about peo- 
ple from their neighbors,” Dabney Mills de- 
clared, quite unabashed. “You are staying 
with your aunt, I understand. Perhaps if I 

went in and spoke to her ” 

“You will do nothing of the sort.” Beatrice 
had found the voice of which astonishment and 
71 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


anger had robbed her. “My aunt is not to be 
disturbed, and there is not the least use in ask- 
ing us any more questions.” 

“Oh, well, of course, if you are going to take 

it like that !” Dabney Mills rose and 

pocketed his note-book. He seemed quite 
unoffended and not convinced even yet that 
his quest was fruitless. “I’ll drop in again in 
a day or two.” 

Beatrice walked with great dignity into the 
house, followed by Nancy, who could not help 
turning to look after the reporter as he trudged 
away through the pines, the cock of his hat 
and the swagger of his shoulders showing that 
he did not acknowledge defeat. 

“I do hope Aunt Anna was n’t disturbed,” 
said Beatrice as she tiptoed into the inner room 
to discover her aunt propped up in the invalid 
chair and rocked by a gale of laughter. 

“You did very well, my dears,” Aunt Anna 
said. '‘Even his back is bristling with indigna- 
72 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 

tion as he marches away. I could not help 
overhearing with the door open, and you were 
both well equal to the situation. What a 
strange, impertinent man, or boy rather, for he 
is scarcely grown up. I wonder that any rep- 
utable newspaper employs him!” 

“He said he was doing this on his own re- 
sponsibility and was going to sell the news to 
a paper later,” explained Beatrice. “He 
thinks he is going to make some startling 
discovery.” 

“I believe,” asserted Nancy wagging her 
head sagely, “that when he was young and his 
character was forming, his mother let him read 
too many detective stories and they didn’t 
agree with him. He thinks he is Sherlock 
Holmes and Craig Kennedy and all the others 
rolled into one. That is what is the matter 
with him.” 

“You take a charitable view, Nancy,” re- 
turned her aunt, “and I rather think your diag- 
73 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

nosis is right. But insistent, foolish people 
of his kind can often do a great deal of harm 
without intending it.” 

Beatrice returned finally to the impatient 
Buck and rode down the path toward the gate. 
It was her intention to explore some of the 
upper trails of the mountainside to-day, for 
she had no desire to ride in the direction of the 
village. Once only had she been forced to go 
to town and she had felt very uneasy under the 
sullen unfriendly stares of the idle foreigners 
lounging about the doorways or sitting in rows 
at the edge of the board sidewalks. 

She was to be delayed once more, however, 
by another visitor, one even more unwelcome 
than the first. She had dismounted to give a 
final jerk to the cinch of the girth and was 
about to swing into the saddle again to ride 
through the gate when she saw Thorvik come 
striding across the lowered bars. His face 
was red with the heat of his steep climb and 
the veins stood out on his forehead below his 
74 : 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


bristling tow-colored hair. Such a face she 
had never seen before, distorted with anger and 
flushed with evil hate. He pulled a letter from 
his pocket as he came near and held it up. 
Thinking that it was for her she stretched out 
her hand to take it, but he snatched it back 
beyond her reach. 

“You are to look, not to have it,” he said in 
a voice thick with rage. 

She saw it was addressed in a plain, school- 
boy hand to “Mrs. Christina Jensen, Ely, 
Montana.” 

“Why,” she cried, “it must be from ” 

“From that Olaf,” snarled Thorvik, “and 
why should he be writing, if not because he has 
had an answer to his letter of long ago. I 
told her there should be no answer. Who 
wrote for her?” 

“I did,” returned Beatrice steadily, although 
her hot temper was beginning to rise within 
her. 

She made a move to remount her horse, but 
75 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the man stepped forward and seized the bridle. 
Buck, nervous and startled, wheeled and 
reared, but could not jerk free from the iron 
grip on his bit. Thorvik moved up the path 
and put himself between Beatrice and the 
house. Terror as well as anger was beginning 
to take possession of her, but she faced him 
without flinching. 

“You wrote it — after I forbid?” His voice 
shook with fury. “Then this is what I do with 
the answer.” He slipped the rein over his 
arm and with his great hard hands tore the 
letter into shreds that went whirling and scat- 
tering in the wind all across the side of the hill. 

“Had Christina read it?” cried Beatrice in 
dismay. 

“No, Christina cannot read, nor I. She is 
crying at home. I told her I would bring the 
letter to you and tear it up before your face, 
to show you how much use is it to meddle with 
the business of other people.” 

“And she will never know what he said?” 

76 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


Beatrice exclaimed. “You took it from her 
before she could hear? You coward — you 
>> 

“Steady, my dear.” 

A man’s quiet voice sounded at her elbow, 
and she turned suddenly to see John Herrick. 

“Anger won’t get you anywhere with peo- 
ple of this fellow’s kind,” he said gently. “If 
you wish to order a man off your grounds, you 
must do it quietly.” 

So, standing firm on the path, fortified by 
the knowledge that John Herrick was beside 
her, Beatrice had the strange delight of direct- 
ing an impertinent intruder to drop her horse’s 
rein and leave her premises, and of seeing him 
obey. For Thorvik went. He blustered, stam- 
mered, then finally relinquished Buck’s bridle 
and marched away to the gate. He stopped 
before he passed through to hurl a defiance 
over his shoulder, but he hastened on imme- 
diately after. 

“His threats grow louder the further 
77 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


away he goes,” commented John Herrick. 

“I — I am glad you came,” observed Beatrice 
a little shakily. The incident had been an un- 
pleasant one, nor could she guess what the re- 
sult would have been had not help appeared 
from such an unexpected quarter. 

“I am glad also,” he returned gravely. “A 
strange creature who called himself a reporter 
stopped me at my door as I was starting for 
the village. He asked me a great many impu- 
dent questions, but he happened to mention 
that he had seen Thorvik going in through your 
gate. At that, I rode off at once, leaving him 
with his mouth and his notebook both still open. 
Here comes our journalistic friend now. He 
seems to find this morning sun a trifle un- 
comfortable.” 

Very hot and wilted did Dabney Mills look 
as he came trudging down the path, his hand- 
kerchief stuck into his over-tall but exceedingly 
limp white collar. Yet his inquiring spirit still 
seemed undismayed. He stopped where John 
78 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


Herrick’s nervous black pony was tied, peered 
over the fence, and poised his pencil once more 
above a page. 

“Won’t you just tell me ” he began. 

“I have told you already,” said John Her- 
rick, “that I have nothing to say. When the 
men get rid of their leader and come to me 
willing to work again, we will inquire into this 
matter of the company’s finances. But while 
they are not in our employ, the company’s 
money is none of their business. Until Thor- 
vik leaves Ely and the laborers stop talking of 
strikes, things shall stand exactly as they are.” 

His tone was so final that even Dabney Mills 
realized that this was the end of the interview 
and walked on unwillingly in the direction 
Thorvik had gone. John Herrick caught 
Buck, gave the rein to Beatrice, and went to 
untie his own horse, but hesitated a moment 
before mounting. His manner assumed sud- 
denly a stiff shyness quite unlike his cordiality 
of a moment before. 


79 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“There is one thing more,” he began. “I 
have been away for some days, but I now un- 
derstand from Hester that your aunt, who is 
with you, has been ill. Is that true?” 

“Yes,” assented Beatrice. She was puzzled 
by his change of manner, but she still felt 
that his kindness invited confidence, and she 
told him fully of the state of Aunt Anna’s 
health and how concerned they were about her. 

“I wanted to suggest,” John Herrick went 
on slowly, “that there is a doctor who lives on 
the other side of Gray Cloud Mountain, a man 
who does not practise now, but who has been 
a famous specialist for just such illness. He 
could help your aunt, I know. He would 
come to see her if I asked him, for he has al- 
ways been a good friend to me. Would you 
care to consult him?” 

“Oh, indeed I would. How kind of you, 
how wonderfully good to have thought of it!” 
exclaimed Beatrice. She had seen the regular 
80 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


doctor of Broken Bow Valley and had not felt 
that he could help them very greatly. 

“Oh, it is nothing,” John Herrick returned, 
apparently somewhat disturbed by the eager- 
ness of her gratitude. “It is just friendly in- 
terest in a neighbor.” He went on speaking 
in a tone of rather careful indifference. “Dr. 
Minturn and his wife are very fond of my 
Hester, and she often rides over to visit them. 
It takes a whole day to go there and another 
to come back, but I believe she would like to 
take the ride with you. She was saying some- 
thing yesterday about going soon to see them. 
I would fetch the doctor myself, but I cannot 
leave Ely to-day. As he does not often ride 
to town for his mail and there is no telephone 
line, he is rather difficult to reach. If you 
wish to wait for a day or two, I will gladly go 
to fetch him.” 

“Oh, no,” replied Beatrice. “I will go to- 
day if Hester is willing. I feel as though I 

81 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


could not wait. And how can I ever thank 
you for — for everything ?” 

There was a curious wistfulness in the look 
that John Herrick bent upon her, and a great 
kindness also. 

“You have taken up rather a large task,” 
he said slowly; “taken it for the most part 
upon your own shoulders. I want you to know 
that, as far as it is in my power, I am going 
to help you make a success of it.” 

His shyness had dropped as suddenly as it 
had come upon him and there was nothing but 
the warmest friendliness in his smile as he 
swung into the saddle. 

By a touch upon the bridle, Beatrice turned 
Buck’s head toward the house, then paused and 
looked back at John Herrick. She saw that 
he had not moved but was sitting his horse 
staring after her. Upon sudden impulse she 
wheeled her pony and rode up to him. 

“You are taking a great deal of trouble for 
— for strangers,” she said, looking him very 
82 





It is you who do not understand/* he returned gravely 


-m 

























• •. . N 









































































SHERLOCK HOLMES 

steadily in the eyes. “I don’t think I can 
ever make you understand how grateful I 
am.” 

“It is you who do not understand,” he re- 
turned gravely, “I ” 

Whether his impatient black horse would no 
longer wait or whether he broke off what he 
was saying by a jerk of the rein, Beatrice 
could not tell. His pony plunged, turned, 
and went galloping away down the road, 
leaving her and Buck to set their faces once 
more toward the cabin. 

It did not take her many minutes to explain 
matters to Nancy and Aunt Anna, to gather 
up what she would need for the journey, and 
to bid them an excited good-by. 

“Of course it is all right for me to go,” she 
assured her aunt in reply to some faint pro- 
test. “Hester goes often and she will be there 
to show me the way.” 

She was away down the path as fast as 
Buck’s nimble feet would take her. When 
83 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


she rode up to the door of the next house, 
Hester was not immediately visible, but 
she appeared presently from the kitchen. 
With a troubled face she listened to the 
plan of their going across the mountain to- 
gether. 

“I wish I could go,” she said, “but old Julia 
has one of her attacks of rheumatism and I 
know I should not leave her. Won’t you 
wait a few days until I can go or Roddy can 
ride over for us?” 

Beatrice, impatient and disappointed, sat 
silent in her saddle, thinking deeply. She 
looked down into the long, sun-flooded valley, 
then up at the sharp slopes above and the 
white, winding trail, calling her to the ad- 
venture. 

“Why shouldn’t I go alone?” she asked 
boldly. “Where you can go, surely Buck and 
I can go also.” 

Hester looked doubtful. 

“The way is clear enough,” she said, “and 
84 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


not very hard going, but you have never 
ridden over it.” 

Beatrice would listen to no objections. By 
the weight of her two years’ seniority and her 
natural determination, she speedily overcame 
all of Hester’s misgivings. She made her 
friend give her full directions, which she felt 
would be easy to follow. 

“I am to keep to the line of the stream as far 
as its head waters and then go up through a 
cleft between two rocks at the very top of the 
pass,” she repeated. “You say the trail is 
fairly plain all the way? Certainly I can 
follow it.” 

“One of the men said something about some 
rocks that had fallen at the very head of the 
stream, and you may have to go around 
them,” Hester said. “Otherwise it is all plain. 
Be careful on the slopes of loose stone and 
don’t leave the trail.” 

“I will be careful,” returned Beatrice. 
“O Hester, what a ride it is going to be!” 

85 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

There was not a mile of the way that dis- 
appointed her. Up and up they went, through 
forest, across clearings, fording the noisy shal- 
lows of the stream that was their guide, scram- 
bling across the faces of rocky slopes where 
Buck picked his way as warily as a cat. She 
ate her lunch beside the stream, drank of the 
ice-cold water and rode on. 

“We must be nearly to the pass,” she 
thought at last, and stopped to look back. 
Broken Bow Valley had shrunk to a mere 
creek-bed, one among many watercourses 
winding beneath. The heavy, dark forest 
seemed to cling, like a blanket, to the lower 
slopes of the mountains, as though it had 
slipped away from the smooth rocky shoulders 
of the heights above. Gray Cloud Pass was 
not a very high one, but to her inexperienced 
eyes, the depths below her were almost enough 
to make her dizzy. A cold wind blew down 
from the ice-fields so that she huddled herself 
86 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


into the grateful warmth of her sheepskin 
coat. 

Higher still they mounted until they came, 
as Hester had foretold, to an impassable mass 
of rock that had fallen across the trail. The 
detour was difficult, up a barren slope covered 
with stunted bushes, and out on a naked spur 
whence she could look away at peak beyond 
peak, some bleak and dark, some shining with 
never-melting snow. Such tiny specks of crea- 
tures as she and Buck were, crawling like flies 
over the rocky hillside! 

'‘Don’t leave the trail.” So Hester had 
warned, but there could be no harm in climb- 
ing a little higher, since she could see so 
plainly where her pathway began again and 
wound crookedly to the narrow passage be- 
tween two huge boulders where she and Buck 
must go through. Above her, caught in a 
cleft in the great shoulder of the mountain, 
was a still, dark lake, its waters held in this 
87 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


cup of the rocks and fed by the melting snows 
of the ice-fields far above. She felt that she 
must see it closer and urged her pony forward. 

It was as still as a polished mirror, deep- 
blue and fringed by a dark circle of pines. 
While she stood, staring fascinated at the 
gleaming surface, a deer came down to drink, 
swam leisurely across the far end of the lake, 
and disappeared into the forest. The motion 
seemed to break her dream, for she turned 
quickly in the saddle and looked down. She 
had climbed above the very summit of the pass, 
for she could see where the trail dipped down- 
hill again, disappearing in a mass of trees. 
It even seemed that she could discern a cot- 
tage below and a wide, open slope of hillside. 
She could also see, however, that the sun was 
perilously near the line of the mountain tops 
and that the day was coming to an end. 

“We must hurry,” she thought quickly. “ I 
believe this is the best way down.” 

Buck moved forward, hesitated, felt for his 
88 


SHERLOCK HOLMES 


footing, and hesitated again. An ominous 
sound came to her ears, the rattling of sliding 
stones. The horse slipped, went forward 
several yards apparently with no will of his 
own, then stopped and turned his white face 
to look around at her. She dismounted to 
lead him, but felt the loose shale give way un- 
der her feet. Frantically she caught at the 
pommel of Buck’s saddle, but in a moment 
they were both slipping together while the 
rattle of the stones increased into a roar. 

“Buck,” she cried aloud, “what have I 
done!” 

The whole mountain seemed to be moving 
under her feet; she knew dimly that the sad- 
dle horn was snatched from her grasp, just be- 
fore she plunged forward into darkness. 


89 


CHAPTER V 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 

W HEN Beatrice opened her eyes, a 
soft, insistent nose was passing over 
her face and hands and breathing warmly a- 
gainst her cheek. She sat up, holding her 
whirling head, to discover that Buck was stand- 
ing over her, apparently puzzled and dis- 
tressed at the mishap to his mistress. It 
seemed strange, after her last glimpse of that 
barren mountain-side of sliding shale, to find 
herself lying half buried in grass and flowers 
with the warm sunshine laying a level ray 
across her face. She got to her knees and 
then to her feet, and found that she was pos- 
sessed of a dizzy head and an aching shoulder, 
that she was bruised and lame, but otherwise 
uninjured. Looking up, she could see where 
90 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 

the slope of loose stone, down which she and 
the horse had slid, ended in a straight wall, a 
drop of eight or ten feet, over which she had 
plunged into the soft grass below. Buck, 
wiser than she, had evidently managed to slide 
less precipitately, and in the end had saved 
himself by jumping. His legs were cut by 
the sharp stones and he was still nervous and 
quivering, but he was not seriously harmed. 

Although she made an effort to climb into 
the saddle, Beatrice found that her knees were 
shaking and her head was so dizzy that she 
was forced to give up the attempt. With her 
hand upon the horse’s neck, she walked along 
the crooked path trodden in the tall grass of 
this high mountain meadow. Bright flowers 
whose names she did not know brushed her 
skirts. The whole hillside, sloping to the 
west, was bathed in the last brightness of the 
waning sunlight. They passed through a tan- 
gle of poplar woods whose dense underbrush 
showed that it was second growth, springing 
91 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


up after the pine forest had been cut. Then 
out into the open they came again, to look 
down into a broad, irrigated valley whose 
checker-board of fields followed the winding 
silver ribbon of the river. 

And this hillside at her feet — was it a forest 
or a garden into which she had stumbled? 
Hundreds of little spruce-trees, as tall as her 
shoulder and all of the same height, marched 
in straight rows across the slope of the moun- 
tain, clothing the steep ground in a smooth 
mantle of lusty green. A stream wound 
downward through the plantation, and on its 
hank, on a level bench below her, were a clump 
of willows and a white cottage with a red roof 
and a wide-open door. 

“That must be Dr. Minturn’s house,” Bea- 
trice reflected and a moment later caught sight 
of Dr. Minturn himself. 

He was sitting on a knoll at the edge of the 
woods, gazing down over his domain and hum- 
92 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 


ming a song in a deep, buzzing voice like a 
bumble-bee. He was a very tall man, with 
tremendous shoulders and a heavy thatch of 
gray hair. He did not notice Beatrice and 
Buck, even when they came close, but sat very 
still, his big hands lying idle on his knees. 
He had the air, however, of being intently 
busy about some project of his own. Beatrice 
watched him, fascinated, wondering what it 
could be that absorbed him so. 

“What — what are you doing?” she asked at 
last. 

He turned around to her, smiling slowly, 
seeming neither startled nor surprised. 

“I ’m getting rich,” he said. 

She looked so bewildered by his reply that 
he jumped up at once. 

“That is one of my stupid jokes and I’ ve 
startled you with it,” he exclaimed in a tone 
of self-reproach. “And you have come over 
that trail all alone — why, you’ ve had an acci- 
93 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

dent. Come down to the house at once and 
let Miriam and me see what we can do for 
you” 

He helped her into the saddle, took Buck’s 
bridle, and conducted them down through the 
rows of spicy-smelling little trees to the door 
of the cottage. On the way Beatrice managed 
to explain why she had come and at whose 
suggestion. The doctor nodded his head in 
immediate agreement. 

“To be sure, I will go,” he said. “I would 
do anything for John Herrick or a friend of 
his, so that’ s all settled. Here’ s Miriam 
coming to the gate to meet you.” 

The cottage was square and neat and white 
and had a garden before it, surrounded by a 
white paling fence — the first garden Beatrice 
had seen since she came to Broken Bow Valley. 
It gave her a pang of homesickness to look at 
the tangled hedge of pink wild roses, the 
clumps of yellow lilies and forget-me-nots, 
and the bright borders of pansies. Miriam, at 
9k 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 


the gate, was a plump, quiet-voiced person 
with smooth gray hair and a placid smile. 

“Miriam would have a garden/’ Dr. Min- 
turn said when the greetings were over and 
Beatrice had admired the flowers. “ Almost 
everything in it is just what runs wild over 
the mountains, but she prefers them behind a 
fence. I think she dreams at night of how 
to make those big, wild forget-me-nots look 
like the little cultivated ones.” 

“The doctor likes to make fun of my gar- 
den,” Mrs. Minturn said in her pleasant soft 
voice. “But it is not very different from what 
he has done with the whole mountain-side. 
It was as bare as your hand when we came 
here, and he has planted every one of the little 
pines himself and has nursed each tree as 
though it were a baby. We call it Christmas- 
tree Hill. But come in, my dear; you must 
rest and wash that cut on your cheek.” 

She led Beatrice to the house and, in taking 
it quite for granted that her guest was to 
95 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

spend the night, conducted her to what the 
girl thought was the smallest and cleanest bed- 
room she had ever seen. Here Mrs. Minturn 
insisted that she must lie down and be tucked 
up under the patchwork quilt and “go to sleep 
for an hour if she could.” Beatrice did not 
sleep, but lay very peacefully, staring at the 
rough plastered walls of the tiny room or, 
through the window, at the myriad little trees 
stepping in their straight, decorous rows across 
the side of the hill. Long before the hour 
was over she was beginning to feel quite rested 
and herself again, and when her hostess came 
to announce that supper was ready she was 
sitting at the window, gazing out at the sun- 
set light on the white peaks of the range op- 
posite. 

After they had eaten, Dr. Minturn insisted 
that she make a tour of the place and, “Go 
on, my dear, I don’t need any help with the 
dishes,” Mrs. Minturn said when her guest 
wished to stay and assist her. “It is n’t often 
96 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 


that the doctor has a chance to show things 
off to a new person, so don’t deny him the 
pleasure.” 

Beatrice accordingly saw everything: the 
horses, the contented cows, even the cheerful 
pig grunting happily to himself in his spot- 
less sty. The chickens occupied a substantial 
residence on account of the owls, coyotes, mar- 
tens, and other wild animals that lent diffi- 
culty and excitement to poultry raising in the 
Rocky Mountains. Then the doctor led Bea- 
trice beyond the garden and the clump of wil- 
lows to where she could see the whole sweep 
of the mountain and the shadows flooding the 
valley as darkness crept up the hill. 

“It was a plan of my own, this replanting 
where the pine forest has been cut,” he ex- 
plained, as he sat down by Beatrice on the 
grassy slope, evidently delighted to have some 
one to listen to his enthusiasm. “The Gov- 
ernment does a good deal of this reforesting 
where tracts have been cut down or burned, 
97 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

but they can’t give the trees the care that I 
do. Nobody could except a man who loves 

them. As they grow big I keep taking out 
some for Christmas-trees or for small timber, 
but the bulk of them shall never be cut until 
they have grown to be giants, a hundred feet 
high. I love to sit here and watch them, each 
year a little bigger, each year more valuable. 
It will be a wonderful piece of timber land 
fifty, sixty, seventy years from now.” 

“But — but ” began Beatrice and 

stopped. She had almost blurted out that a 
man who was gray-haired at the planting of 
these trees could not hope to see them grow to 
that mighty forest of which he dreamed. 

“Oh, I know I will be gone long before 

then, ” he replied serenely, “but what does it 
matter? We live here in the mountains to 
keep Miriam well ; she does n’t get on in the 
valleys and towns. She has her garden and 
I have my trees and we are happy enough, 

98 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 


thinking about the future, even if it is a future 
long beyond our time. Mines that we never 
heard of will be timbered from these trees, to 
bring out gold and silver for our children’s 
children; there will be ships with these pines 
for masts that will sail to ports I never saw. 
There will be houses built — I can almost see 
the people that will be born and live and die 
under the roofs that my trees will make.” 

His eyes had been on the far distance, but 
he turned to fix them intently on Beatrice’s. 

“If you live on a mountain,” he said, “you 
can see much more than if you belong to the 
crowded, pushing, hurrying people that stay 
in the valley.” 

“And now,” he declared, after a little pause, 
4 'here I have talked and talked just as Miriam 
said I would, but I want you to have a turn. 
You have told us your name and that you know 
John Herrick, but may I hear the rest? 
Where are you living and how did you happen 
99 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


to come to Ely? Strangers are not so com- 
mon but that we backwoods people like to 
know all about them.” 

Rather to her own surprise Beatrice found 
herself telling not only what she hoped he 
would do for her aunt, but all about why they 
had come to Ely, even to her own puzzle as 
to what Aunt Anna’s special reason had been 
for insisting so earnestly that she would not 
go away. She told him of the strike, of her 
acquaintance with Christina, the visit of Dab- 
ney Mills, and her new-found friendship with 
Hester Herrick. He looked concerned over 
some portions of her tale and smiled over 
others. He laughed aloud when she described 
the midnight departure of Joe Ling. 

“You were right to give up when he went 
away,” he commented. “The Chinamen in 
these valleys seem to know everything and 
just when to get out of the way of trouble. 
I know Joe. He has a little house and truck 
garden outside of Ely. He will stay there 
100 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 


quietly until, in his own strange way, he has 
found out that the disturbance is over for 
good, and then he will come back.” He 
nodded with satisfaction when she spoke of 
the Herricks. 

“I am glad you know them,” he said. “We 
— we think a lot of Hester ourselves, and 
John Herrick — there are few men I like and 
admire as much.” 

“I like them too,” agreed Beatrice. “I 
don’t understand just how they belong to each 
other; she says he isn’t really her father.” 

“I ’ll not forget,” Dr. Minturn began 
slowly; “I ’ll not forget in a long time the day 
I first saw John Herrick. I was up at the 
edge of the woods where you found me and 
he came riding down the trail : had been riding 
all night or longer than that, perhaps. By 
the look on his face I could see that black 
trouble rode behind him and that he had not 
been able to gallop away from it. I didn’t 
say much to him, but I brought him home — 
101 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


he and the horse were dead tired — and we got 
him to stay with us for three days, until that 
strained look began to disappear from his face. 
I did n’t know what had happened to him and 
I did n’t dare to ask. That was ten years ago 
and I know him nearly as well as I know my- 
self, but I have never asked him yet.” 

“And did he have Hester with him then?” 
Beatrice asked. 

“Bless you, no. Hester lived with us. She 
was born at our house and her mother died 
there; her father had died before. They were 
some far kin of Miriam’s, and we kept the 
baby when the others were gone. Our own 
two children were grown up and married, so 
we were glad enough to have her ourselves. 
She was six years old, a fat, merry little thing, 
and the way she and John took to each other 
would do your heart good. He would sit on 
the door-stone and play with her for hours, 
or they would take walks together, up and 
down the rows of pine-trees, the first ones that 
102 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 

had been planted then. He came back to see 
us many times, for he rode back and forth 
among the mountains, looking at mines, buy- 
ing up ranches. Everything he touched 
seemed to prosper, but he never looked happy. 
It was a whole year after, that he came one 
day and said he wanted Hester.” 

“Oh, how could you give her up?” exclaimed 
Beatrice. 

“I thought I couldn’t,” returned the doc- 
tor rather glumly, ‘‘and I vowed I would n’t, 
but Miriam said to me, ‘Look at his face, can’t 
you see how he needs her?’ and of course in 
the end I had to give in. The care of a small 
child was really too much for Miriam. If 
John had not seen that, he would never have 
asked for her. Herrick is better off than we; 
he can do a great deal for Hester that we 
never could. While she has been growing up 
she has had everything that a sensible rich 
man’s money could give her. He built that 
house just for her, and, oh, he is a lonely man 
103 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


in it when she is away at school. She came 
back to stay with us when he went overseas 
during the war, but they surely were glad to 
be together again.” 

“And you never knew where he came from?” 
the girl questioned wonderingly. 

“Neither that nor what trouble drove him 
to our mountains. We don’t go too deep into 
a man’s past in the West. We like him and 
stand by him for what he is.” 

It was quite dark now, and a white blot, 
moving through the dusk toward them, proved 
to be Mrs. Minturn’s gown, as her quiet voice 
presently proved. 

“I am sure the doctor must have told you the 
history of every tree by now, even to the ones 
that the badgers dug up and the rows the 
deer nibbled. It is time you both came in.” 

“Only think, she lives in the cabin where you 
planted the pansies,” her husband returned 
as he raised his long length from the bank 
where they had been sitting. 

104 


CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL 


“Oh, did you plant them?” asked Beatrice. 
“I believe they were what made me love the 
place the first time I saw it.” 

“Yes, it was I that put them there. We 
had been over to see Hester and I had bought 
a basketful of the plants in Ely, though the 
doctor laughed at me and said I had no room 
for them in the crowded garden. He was 
quite right, so, when Hester and I took a 
walk while he was talking business with John, 
we happened to go by the cabin and it looked 
so lonely that I just stopped and we planted 
the pansies by the steps. I am glad they are 
growing. And now you must come in for 
you need sleep, I know. As I say, the doctor 
loves to talk of his trees but I feel sure he has 
told you everything.” 

“All but one thing,” Dr. Minturn said as 
he tucked Miriam’s arm under his and turned 
toward the house. “That is, that Christmas- 
tree Hill is to belong to Hester some day 
when you and I can’t enjoy it any more.” 

105 


CHAPTER VI 


OLAF 

S PED by the kindly farewells of Miriam, 
Beatrice and Dr. Minturn set out next 
day on their return ride across the pass and 
reached the cabin without undue adventure. 
During the doctor’s long interview with Aunt 
Anna, the two girls sat beside the fire, holding 
each other’s hands tightly, neither speaking a 
word to voice her hopes or fears. When the 
doctor came out, however, one glimpse of his 
smiling face was enough to cheer them both. 

“Nothing seriously wrong,” was his verdict, 
“and you have brought her to just the climate 
and just the sort of life to make her well.” 
He gave them long and careful directions as 
to what they were to do and then got up to 
say good-bye. “I am going over to John 
106 


OLAF 


Herrick’s to spend the night, and I will see 
you again before I go back.” 

He visited the village also before his de- 
parture, for he seemed interested in the prog- 
ress of the trouble there. He had a long talk 
with Nancy and Beatrice out under the pines 
beside the stream the next morning. 

“Your aunt will get well,” he assured them. 
“She is anxious and unhappy and troubled, be- 
sides her illness. You say that you don’t un- 
derstand why, but in time she may tell you.” 

“Did she tell you?” Nancy asked him sud- 
denly for he was the sort of person to invite 
confidences. 

“No, she told me very little, but old doctors 
guess a great deal. She will tell you herself 
some day.” 

He went on to explain that a sleeping-porch 
must be added to the cabin, since it was im- 
perative that she sleep out of doors. 

“I spoke about it to John Herrick and he 
can send some one over to build it for you,” 
107 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

he said. “Old Tim who works for him is a 
carpenter of sorts, though he is rather tottery 
and slow and you must not be impatient if 
the work seems to drag. Now I believe that 
is all ” 

“I wish I could tell you ” Beatrice be- 

gan as he got up. She wanted to thank him 
for breaking out of his long retirement and 
rendering services for which he would accept 
no fee. He cut short her halting words at once. 

“I don’t want to hear anything about that,” 
he declared. “Just be careful of your aunt 
and get her confidence if you can. I will be 
here again before so very long. That situa- 
tion in the village bears watching and I want 
to see how it turns out. I never saw any- 
thing quite like it — all the idle men wrangling 
and quarreling, since there is no one outside 
to quarrel with. The fellow that got away 
with the money and shut down the works, he 
is the one they are after, but since neither 
they nor the sheriff nor that clever reporter 
108 


OLAP 


fellow can find him, they have to take out 
their bad humor on one another. It is a dan- 
gerous place, a town full of ugly-tempered 
men, especially when they have some one like 
that Thorvik to keep the agitation boiling.” 

“But who could have taken the money?” 
asked Nancy. 

‘‘Blessed if I know,” returned the doctor. 
“There was n’t even a masked man with a 
black horse and a pair of automatics such as 
the movies tell us belong to an affair like that. 
Well, I must be getting back to Miriam. 
Good-by.” 

He clambered, with his awkward length, 
into the saddle, and set off, leaving the girls 
much lighter of heart than they had been be- 
fore his visit. It would be hard to measure 
the extent of their gratitude. 

Next day old Tim, with his tools over his 
shoulder and a creaking wagon-load of lumber 
following him up to the gate, came to begin 
on the sleeping-porch. It was quite true that 
109 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


he worked very slowly and that after ten days 
the porch was still not finished, but his efforts 
to make everything as comfortable as possible 
were so earnest that the girls could not grow 
impatient with him. At the end of that time 
he appeared one morning with a helper, a 
broad-shouldered boy of about eighteen with 
tow-colored hair and the widest and most 
friendly smile Beatrice had ever seen. 

“Who is he? Did he come from the village?” 
she asked, but old Tim answered evasively. 
He was just some one staying at John Her- 
rick’s for a while, and he thought he would 
come over and help. Beyond that she could 
learn nothing, although she noticed that when 
supplies were wanted from Ely it was always 
old Tim who went for them, never his younger 
helper. The boy worked hard and was as shy 
of speech as Tim was fluent. After his com- 
ing the building went on rapidly. All sorts 
of improvements were added besides the porch. 
Cupboards in the kitchen had been demanded 
110 


OLAF 


by Nancy, but they had not dreamed of dor- 
mer-windows for their little rooms under the 
roof, high-backed settles for the fireplace, and 
a palatial box stall for Buck. The request 
“for a few shelves for pots and kettles” was 
materialized into a spacious pantry rich in cup- 
boards, shelves, drawers, and pegs for the 
hanging of each utensil and into a transformed 
kitchen with everything rearranged to the 
great increase of comfort and convenience. 

“We wanted John Herrick to come over 
and see what we had done,” Tim said one day, 
“but somehow he does n’t do it, though he is 
always asking about the work. A lot of the 
things we have done were his suggestion. 
Those sliding shutters on the porch were his 
special idea. There could n’t be anything bet- 
ter to keep out the rain and snow.” 

“Snow?” echoed Nancy, who was standing 
beside him to admire his work as he loved to 
have her do. “Why, we are only going to be 
here for the summer!” 


Ill 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“It can snow any day it wants to in these 
mountains,” Tim returned. “There ’s more 
in January than in June, to be sure, but you 
may wake up any morning and find the ground 
white. It can snow just as easy as rain here- 
abouts.” 

Beatrice had been watching Tim’s helper 
keenly from day to day with a growing sus- 
picion lurking in her mind. Besides giving 
assistance with the building he came to the 
house daily with the milk and eggs that Hester 
supplied. One morning when she was astir 
early she saw him meet Christina on the path 
below the house and watched him take from 
her the basket in which she was bringing their 
marketing. In the thin quiet air their voices 
came up to her window more clearly than they 
seemed to realize. 

“Is n’t it too heavy?” he questioned. “And 
you ’re looking pale and tired. That — that 
Thorvik has been abusing you again. I ’d like 
to get my hands on him.” 

112 


OLA B 


“No, no,” cried Christina in terror, “you 
must not let him or any one in the village see 
you. You promised John Herrick you would 
not go near the town until he found out how 
things stood for you. He said it was safer 
and easier that no one at all should know you 
were here. Thorvik does not harm me; it is 
only the — the things he says about my good 
friends.” 

“I can’t stand by and see him make you 
miserable,” protested the boy hotly. 

“You promised,” repeated Christina ob- 
stinately. “You can’t break the word you 
gave.” 

“Then some day I will be giving John Her- 
rick his promise back again,” he returned, his 
voice rising louder. “Thorvik will find ” 

Christina, glancing anxiously at the win- 
dows, warned him to silence. They went to- 
gether into the kitchen, leaving Beatrice to 
ponder what she had heard. 

“That letter to Olaf got such a quick an- 
113 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


swer that it must have found him just back 
from a voyage,” she was reflecting. “And 
we never read what he wrote. It must have 
been to say that he was coming home. I sup- 
pose they kept his being here a secret even 
from us so that if any one asked us we would 
not know. There is always that Dabney 
Mills hanging about trying to find out 
things.” 

The day was so full that she had little time 
to talk of the matter with Nancy until they 
sat by the fire late that evening. The blaze 
was always a grateful one on these nights that 
grew so chilly the moment the sun was gone. 
Aunt Anna had finally gone to bed on the 
new sleeping-porch, Nancy sat on one of 
Tim’s settles by the hearth, knitting busily, 
while Beatrice, openly idle and dreaming, 
sat opposite gazing into the changing flames. 
Her mind was running afar upon such vari- 
ous things that even now she did not come im- 
mediately to the question of Christina’s son. 

114 * 


OLAF 


“Nancy,” she said, “don’t you begin to feel 
like an entirely different person from the one 
you were when we came here?” 

Her sister nodded in quick assent. 

“I never knew before that I could do so — 
so much thinking ” she agreed rather vaguely. 
“I am busy every minute but there is time to 
turn things over in my mind, ever so many 
things about you and Aunt Anna and dad 
and myself and, oh — just about living. When 
I look back at last winter and all the time 
before, it seems as though we were always in 
a crowd of people, people who were all talk- 
ing at once and all wanting me to do something 
with them in a hurry. I liked it, but I never 
had time to think about anything at all.” 

“Yes,” returned Beatrice slowly, “there was 
always something to do and somewhere to go 
and that seemed all there was to living. 
Think of my head being so full of things that 
I forgot about having an uncle. I must have 
seen him and have heard dad and Aunt Anna 
115 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


talk of him, but I never noticed it at last when 
he never came any more and was never men- 
tioned. But I think about him now. I 
think about him more — and more.” 

Nancy laid down her knitting and leaned 
forward. 

“Do you?” she questioned. “So do I. Do 
you think it could be because of him, some- 
way, that Aunt Anna wanted to come here?” 
“It may be,” said Beatrice, “but, if it is, where 
is he?” 

They looked at each other, an unspoken 
question in their eyes. 

“There is another thing,” pursued Beatrice. 
“That boy who has been helping Tim is 
Christina’s son Olaf. I had thought so be- 
fore but to-day I am certain.” 

“I had been suspecting that too,” said 
Nancy. “One day I asked her if she didn’t 
want us to write her another letter, and she 
laughed, so happily, and said, ‘Not just yet.’ ” 

The door from the bedroom opened softly 
116 


OLAF 


and Aunt Anna came in. Her cheeks were 
pink from the fresh air outside, her fair hair 
was ruffled, and she was wrapped in the dark 
fur robe that the girls had laid over her bed. 
She looked very pretty as she sat in the big 
chair that they pulled out for her, the glow of 
the fire lighting her face. 

“I heard your voices,” she said, “and, 
though it is glorious out there with the sound 
of the water and with the tops of the trees 
showing against the stars, I was not able to 
sleep, so I thought I would come in and talk 
to you a little.” She leaned back in her chair 
and sighed blissfully. “What good care you 
take of me and how well I feel! I do not 
seem to be the same person.” 

The girls laughed in unison, it was so like 
what they had been saying. 

‘‘Beatrice,” her aunt went on suddenly, 
“Dr. Minturn told me about your falling over 
the cliff when you went to fetch him for me.” 

“It was not much of a cliff,” returned 
117 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


Beatrice sheepishly, involuntarily rubbing the 
bruised elbow that was now the one memento 
of her misadventure. She had meant to keep 
that incident from Aunt Anna’s knowledge. 

“It frightened me,” her aunt said, “but it 
opened my eyes to what you were willing to 
do for me. We are all of us changed and we 
are all beginning to understand one another 
better. At home, with your rounds of shop- 
ping and motoring and dancing, I used to 
think we were not much more than casually 
acquainted. And there was something of 
which I always wanted to talk to you, but I 
wondered if a day would ever come when you 
would have time to listen and understand. I 
did not want you to hear unless you could see 
it all as clearly as I did myself.” 

“And do you think,” asked Beatrice, her 
voice low and eager, “do you believe that the 
time has come now?” 

‘‘Yes,” was the answer, “I think the time 
has come now. It is right that you should 
118 


OLAF 


hear at last what has been hanging heavy on 
my heart for these ten years — about why I 
came here — about my brother.” 


119 


CHAPTER VII 


“my brother jack” 

“ V HAVE often wondered,” Aunt Anna be- 
I gan her story that was to explain so much 
that the girls had not understood; “I have 
often wondered that you did not remem- 
ber your uncle, my younger brother Jack. 
When you talked of things you had done when 
you were small children, I used to listen 
hungrily, hoping you might speak of him, but 
you never did. He was with us a great deal 
when you were little things, and he was always 
in the nursery or playing with you in the gar- 
den, for he loved children. That was soon 
after I came to live with you, and when he 
was in college, studying to be an engineer. 
He spent all his vacations with us : I wish you 
had not been too young to remember.” 

120 


“MY BROTHER JACK” 


Beatrice wrinkled her brows and vainly 
searched for a fleeting recollection. 

“I don’t remember anything clearly,” she 
said at last. “There has been so much be- 
tween.” 

“When my brother left college he went to 
work immediately and was so eager and inter- 
ested in his first ‘job.’ It was the building 
of a dam and resevoir for the water supply 
of a town near us, a project that was being 
financed by the company of which your father 
is a director. It was through his means that 
Jack was put in charge of the work, although 
he was very young for such responsibility, too 
young, I insisted at the time. And it was 
proved that he was too young. He did his 
work well, he was a brilliant engineer, but he 
trusted too much to the honor of other people 
and he — he did not take things as an older man 
would.” 

She paused, and Nancy, putting down her 
121 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


knitting, came to sit on the floor beside her 
chair. 

“Poor Aunt Anna,” she said, “did some- 
thing dreadful happen?” 

Slowly her aunt nodded, looking steadily into 
the fire, as though tears might come should 
she allow her eyes to waver. 

“Yes,” she answered, “something happened 
that has darkened my life, every day of it, 
for all these years. 

“We did not see so much of my brother 
after he began working, for he was absorbed 
and busy. As is usual in such cases, a con- 
tractor was doing the work under his plan- 
ning and his supervision. Things went very 
well — for some months. Then one day, like 
a thunderclap, came the news that the project 
was being carried on with gross dishonesty. 
A great deal more money had been advanced 
for the work than had actually been spent on 
construction, false records of costs had been 
turned in, machinery ordered and not paid for, 
122 


“MY BROTHER JACK 3 


debts incurred on every side, with many thou- 
sands of dollars completely vanished. Some 
one, it was evident, had been pocketing the 
difference, and an immediate investigation was 
set on foot. 

“It was a terrible blow to your father. I 
do not know myself what he thought when 
the facts first became known, but he at once 
asked some of his fellow-directors to meet at 
his house and said that Jack would be there 
to explain matters to them before there should 
be a formal meeting of the whole board next 
day. They called me in to act as secretary, 
since they wanted a record kept but desired 
the whole affair to be kept private. I can 
remember how my knees shook as I went in 
and sat down at the end of the library table. 
There were five men there, most of them gray- 
headed, all of them unspeaking, even your 
father. I was in a wild hurry to have Jack 
come. I wanted the matter cleared quickly. 
I could hardly keep from crying out in the 
123 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


storm of impatience and suspense I felt dur- 
ing those minutes we waited. 

“He came at last and I can shut my eyes 
and see him still, standing before that group 
of grave men, so young, so white-faced and 
excited, so eager to explain. They asked him 
questions and he answered them in the 
straight-forward way he always had. They 
looked more serious and questioned him again, 
while my hands shook as I wrote down the an- 
swers, they were so frank and open, and they 
were doing him so much harm. 

“ ‘Why had he not gone over the accounts 
more thoroughly?’ 

“He had felt that his work was the scientific 
end of the enterprise. He had left financial 
matters almost entirely to the contractor, who, 
so he had considered, was completely honest. 

“ ‘Did he suspect the man now?’ 

‘Tt was plain from the misappropriation of 
the funds that the man had been robbing them. 

“Yes, but could he offer material proof that 
124 


‘MY BROTHER JACK” 


it was the contractor, and he alone, who had 
been pocketing the money?’ 

“No, he had no proof, so far. 

“He was so inexperienced, so sure that every 
one was as honorable as he, so certain that 
everybody had equal faith in him. He was 
half-way through the interview before he re- 
alized what they suspected. 

“I had thought, when he came in, how much 
of a boy he was still. Then, all in one mo- 
ment, I saw him grow to be a man. The idea 
that they might consider him guilty seemed to 
deal him a staggering blow, as though some 
one had actually struck him between the eyes. 

“ ‘You believe that I have profited by this 
dirty business, you think that my own hands 
are not clean?’ he cried out suddenly, and 
waited a long minute for some one to answer. 

“In every group there is always at least 
one man of a certain type, hard, inflexible, 
strict with himself, and merciless to others. 
Robert Kirby was the man of that sort in our 
125 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


company that day. He sat at the opposite 
end of the table from me, and I had watched 
him nervously as he turned his little sharp 
eyes on Jack and never moved them from 
his face. By some terrible mischance it was he 
who found words first. 

“ ‘After all you have said,’ he declared in 
his cutting voice, ‘it would be hard for any of 
us to believe otherwise.’ 

“Jack wheeled to your father and faced him, 
not with a question, but an accusation. 

“ ‘You believe it too!’ he cried. 

“Your father is slow of speech at best and 
he was excited and upset. He voiced his faith 
in his brother, but he spoke a second too late. 

“ ‘You all of you believe it, every one. It is 
because your eyes are as blind as the dollars 
you are always counting.’ 

“He turned so quickly to the door that no 
one could stop him. I was the only one that 
managed to move as he flung it open. 

“ ‘Not I.’ With all my strength I called it 
126 


“MY BROTHER JACK” 


after him as I stood up in my place at the end 
of the table. ‘Oh Jack, not IT 

“But the door had slammed so quickly that 
I think he did not hear. 

“We all sat very still, unable to speak, a- 
shamed even to look at one another. Robert 
Kirby again was the first to break the silence. 

“ ‘He should be stopped; he must be put un- 
der arrest,’ he said, but your father got up 
and stood with his back against the door. 

“ ‘If it is true that my brother is guilty, and 
Heaven grant it is not so,’ he declared, ‘all the 
money shall be repaid at once. This matter 
is to go no farther.’ 

“We never saw Jack again. Your father 
had a letter from him, saying that of course 
he considered himself responsible for the losses 
to the company since his own folly had 
brought them about. ‘Other people may think 
I am guilty if they like. If you and Anna do 
not believe in me I do not care what decision 
Robert Kirby and his friends come to,’ he 
127 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

added. He had disposed of all the property 
left to him by our father and was turning over 
the sum realized to cover the defaulted amount. 
There was a little lacking, a few hundred dol- 
lars, and this he was obliged — you could see 
even in that business-like letter how it hurt him 
to do so — to ask your father to advance. In 
return he was delivering to him the title deeds 
‘to that piece of land in Montana, Anna can 
tell you about it, there is no time to sell that 
in a hurry and I want this infernal business 
closed.’ That was the only letter we ever re- 
ceived from him, and that was ten years ago. 

“The land he spoke of was this bit of hill- 
side,, with the cabin, where we are living now. 
We took a gay journey, during one of Jack’s 
vacations, just vaguely ‘West’ because he had 
always said there was the best opening for a 
man in the Western States, and he hoped to 
live there some day. His grandmother had 
given him a thousand dollars, ‘just to see how 
he would invest it,’ she said, and was a little 
128 


“MY BROTHER JACK” 


dismayed when he came back and told her he 
had purchased a part of a mountain in Mon- 
tana. We had been to the Coast; we had 
seen the Grand Canon and Yellowstone Park. 
It was a man we met in the Park who per- 
suaded Jack to buy this piece of land, saying 
that the timber on it was worth a good deal 
and there was always the chance of a mine. 
We come over to see the purchase and spent a 
day in Ely, though most of it was put in 
riding through the hills and scrambling over 
as many steep trails as we could find. We 
climbed so high we could see valley after val- 
ley spread out below us, and the air was so 
clear one felt that it was possible to see half- 
way round the world if only the mountains 
did not block the way. There were two or three 
riders scattered over the trail below, tiny 
black figures like toys, although everything 
was so still we could hear their voices shout- 
ing to one another and could hear the plunge 
and splash of a waterfall a mile away. It had 
129 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


been snowing on the peaks, but where we were 
it was hot in the blazing sunshine. Jack sat 
staring, staring, and staring into the valley 
and at last he said: 

“Anna, from a height like this you ought 
to be able to see what sort of a place the 
world really is.’ 

“I have never forgotten/’ 

A burning pine cone fell from the heap of 
coals and rolled out on the hearth. Beatrice, 
who had been listening so intently that she 
had not moved, rose now and fell to mending 
the fire. 

“And did you never find any trace of him?” 
Nancy gently brought Aunt Anna back to her 
story. 

‘‘Never, my dear, though we tried in every 
way you could imagine. He was determined 
to disappear out of our lives, and we were not 
able to prevent it. A year or two later the 
same contractor was proved to be connected 
with some such scandalous frauds that he was 
130 


“MY BROTHER JACK 5 


sent to the penitentiary. The first matter was 
dropped on account of your father’s influence 
and the fact that J ack had made restitution, so 
that the man was bolder when he tried again. 
Your father had made some effort to procure 
proof against him, but there was nothing def- 
inite enough to exornerate Jack before the 
world. When the man was finally convicted, 
we thought that must surely clear my broth- 
er’s name. Yet I was present when your 
father laid the facts before Robert Kirby, who 
only grunted and said that nothing could con- 
vince him that they had not worked together 
the first time. When I say my prayers and 
come to the place where we must forgive our 
enemies, I have to struggle with myself all 
over again to forgive Robert Kirby, al- 
though all the time I know him to be noth- 
ing but a misled, ignorant, obstinate old 
man.” 

“I would call him something worse,” de- 
clared Nancy with heat. 

131 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


There was quiet for a little as they all sat 
thinking. 

“And did you think that you might find him 
here, Aunt Anna?” Beatrice finally asked 
slowly. 

“I thought we might find him or get news 
of him. When the doctor said this year I 
must go away or — or not get well, I vowed 
that, if it were the last thing I did, I would 
look for him once more. He loved this place 
so much that I always felt, somehow, that he 
would come back to it. We had written to 
him here, but the letters came back to us with 
word that no such person was to be found ; and 
your father made inquiries when he came to get 
us a house. He did not approve much of our 
settling down here for the summer, but I was 
determined and he had to give way.” 

“Yet we almost had to go back,” Nancy ob- 
served. 

“Yes, if it had not been for Beatrice’s think- 
ing of the cabin and for her courage in bring- 
132 


“MY BROTHER JACK 5 


ing us here, we would have had to give it up. 
And so far we have heard nothing, but I can- 
not help hoping that we still may.” 

“But why, Aunt Anna, why did you never 
tell us before?” Beatrice put the question with 
the same puzzled frown she had worn when 
the story began. 

“I wanted to, but I could not bear to. 
You were always so hurried and so deep in af- 
fairs of your own, as is the natural thing. To 
tell you and have you think, even for a fleet- 
ing minute, that my brother did wrong — that 
would have been beyond endurance. He is 
only a name to you, and after all, as Robert 
Kirby says, nothing has ever been proved. But 
you must believe in my brother; you must ” 

She leaned back and a slow tear of weari- 
ness and long-endured misery rolled down her 
cheek. The recital had tired her far more than 
they had realized, so that Nancy, suddenly 
taking alarm, whisked her away to bed. 
There, with many loving pats and hugs and 
133 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

.words of affectionate comfort, they at last 
saw her ready for sleep. 

!Yet Beatrice, lying 'broad awake in her 
little room, watching the curtains flutter in 
the windy dark, could not put from her mind 
the thought of what she had heard. Presently 
she got up to steal into Nancy’s room opposite 
and see how she was faring. She found that 
the bed was empty and that her sister was 
kneeling by the window, staring out into the 
forest. A solitary coyote was yelping in the 
woods, but it was a sound to which they had 
become so accustomed that it was doubtful if 
they even heard it. The pale light of a late 
moon showed the moving tree-tops, the dark 
chasm of the stream, and, hardly to be dis- 
cerned among the pines, the square chimney 
stacks and one tiny light that marked the place 
of John Herrick’s house. 

“Don’t stay there in the cold,” remonstrated 
Beatrice. “You can’t see anything or — or 
anybody in the middle of the night.” 

134 


“MY BROTHER JACK” 


“I know it,” sighed Nancy as she turned 
from the window. “I was just thinking.” 

She climbed on the bed and sat with her 
knees humped and her arm flung around them, 
still staring, as thought fascinated, out through 
the window toward that slope of the mountain 
where John Herrick lived. 

“He does n’t look like dad or Aunt Anna,” 
Beatrice protested suddenly, with no apparent 
connection with anything that had been said. 
“No, he isn’t like them at all.” 

“Maybe not,” returned Nancy inscrutably, 
“but he has that same light yellow hair that 
she has. If Aunt Anna were very sunburnt 
or he were very pale — it might be — that they 
would not be so very different.” 


135 


CHAPTER VIII 


MRS. BRUIN 

A LTHOUGH the girls had talked so late 
of Aunt Anna’s story and the strange 
thought they had concerning it, they were up 
early next morning and still discussing the 
matter busily as they prepared breakfast. 

‘‘The question is,” said Nancy, plying her 
egg-beater with vigor, “shall we tell Aunt 
Anna what we think ” 

“If we should be mistaken, and John Her- 
rick should turn out to be, oh, just anybody, 
she would be so disappointed. Perhaps we 
had better wait.” 

They had hardly finished breakfast when 
there was a knock at the door, followed by 
Dr. Minturn’s tall presence on the threshold. 
He inspected his patient and announced a very 
136 


MRS. BRUIN 


great improvement, and then said he must go 
on at once, since he hoped to visit the town 
and start back over the mountain that same 
day. Beatrice walked down with him through 
the pines, for he had tied his horse at the gate. 

“Your aunt seems less worried and far more 
cheerful than before,” he said. 

“Yes,” assented Beatrice, “I think it is be- 
cause she has told us at last why she came.” 
She went on to give the substance of Aunt 
Anna’s story. 

“I surmised it was something like that,” he 
observed when he had heard her to the end, 
“and I have been thinking about it ever since. 
I don’t know any man in this neighborhood by 
the name of Deems but — I believe he is not 
so far away after all.” 

Beatrice looked at him steadily. 

“I believe that too,” she said. 

Dr. Minturn stopped, for they had reached 
the bars, but he made no move to mount his 
horse. 


137 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“I ’m going to give you some advice that 
is n’t medical,” he began. “I think more of 
John Herrick than of any other man in the 
world, barring my own son, perhaps, and I 
love Hester as though she were mine. And 
you three here, your aunt and your sister and 
you, I have come to think of you all as better 
friends than I had ever thought to make again. 
Your aunt — why, she has more pluck in one 
inch of that little sick body of hers than I 
have in my whole big self, and her girls are n’t 
far behind her. I ’d like to see her have what 
she wants, I ’d like to see you all happy.” 

He drew a long breath and spoke lower. 

“Whatever you think is or is n’t so,” he 
warned, ‘‘don’t — press anybody too hard, don’t 
push some one by letting him know too quickly 
that you have guessed who he is. Your aunt 
is eager and overwrought ; who would n’t be, 
after ten years of anxiety and sorrow? She 
and you might be in too much of a hurry and 
ruin everything. John thinks he is safe under 
138 


MRS. BRUIN 


his assumed name and with your aunt too ill 
to be about. He knows who you are and per- 
haps why you have come, but he can’t yet 
make up his mind to conquer his stubborn 
pride. Give him time, that is all I say, give 
him time. He rode away into the hills the first 
day he saw you, but he must have thought 
things out up there in the mountains, for he 
came back again. But he can’t come all the 
way yet.” 

“Do you think he ever will?” Beatrice asked 
anxiously. 

“Yes, I think he will. Does your aunt have 
any suspicion of who he is?” 

“I am sure she has n’t,” Beatrice declared. 
“She thinks of him as Hester’s father, some 
one too old to be her brother. No, she does n’t 
dream it.” 

“Then don’t tell her and don’t tell him,” he 
urged. “Wait until John is ready to tell her 
himself. You must go gently with a man who 
has been hurt to his very soul.” 

139 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


Beatrice held out her brown hand and the 
doctor shook it solemnly. She watched him 
ride away ; then returned to the house to saddle 
Buck and set off presently up the mountain. 
Her mind was full of new, excited hopes that 
seemed to dance to the music of Buck’s flying 
feet. 

Nancy, meanwhile, was not thinking so much 
of their new problem. She had the faculty of 
being completely absorbed in the object in 
hand and to-day that object was a cake. 
Christina had given her a Scandinavian recipe, 
dwelling so much on the unusual deliciousness 
of the result that Nancy could scarcely wait 
to try it. With the greatest of care she mixed 
and measured and weighed and stirred. 

“It is rather a long cake,” she reflected after 
she had spent an hour combining the ingre- 
dients, but she felt certain that the completed 
dish would amply repay her toil. 

She had just got it into the oven when a 
knock sounded on the kitchen door to an- 
140 


MRS. BRUIN 


nounce the boy whom Hester had sent with 
a basket of eggs. 

“Thank you, Olaf,” she said as he set them 
down; then flushed since she had not meant 
to speak his name. The color flooded his face 
also. “I beg your pardon,” she added quickly 
“We have been guessing who you were, but 
we did n’t mean to pry into any secrets.” 

“It does not matter,” he assured her. “My 
mother and John Herrick made me promise 
that I would not go to the village while things 
were so upset, since he says there is no use in 
stirring up bad feeling again. You sister’s 
letter caught me in San Francisco, just as I 
was to sail ; but I could n’t help coming home, 
once I knew that my mother really wanted to 
see me. But I don’t like this hiding away, and 
I only agreed to it because I would do anything 
John Herrick says.” 

Old Tim came in to put away his tools and 
to sit down upon the doorstep for a moment 
to rest. 


141 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“I can’t think of another thing to do to 
this cabin,” he confessed. “I have to own that 
it is time for me to go home.” 

He was just getting up to take his leave 
when a step was heard on the path and Dab- 
ney Mills came around the corner of the house, 
smiling and quite unabashed by any memories 
of his departure some days before. 

“I heard voices,” he said, “so I just thought 
I would n’t disturb any one by knocking at 
the front door and would ” 

“Would see if you could n’t overhear some- 
thing,” Tim cut him short. “Well, we ’re not 
speaking of anything you shouldn’t hear, so 
our talk would n’t interest you.” 

He walked away leaving the intruding youth 
looking after him in speechless indignation. 
Nancy turned to the stove to look at her cake. 

“I don’t know this gentleman,” she heard 
Dabney say, staring at Olaf, and she heard 
Tim reply over his shoulder, “Nor do you 
need to know him, so far as I can see.” 

142 


MRS. BRUIN 


“I heard you talk of going berrying the 
other day, Miss Nancy,” Olaf said, coming to 
the door and quite disregarding the inquisitive 
reporter. “This is the best sort of a day for it, 
and I can show you just where to go. Your 
sister is coming up the hill, so your aunt won’t 
be left alone. Would n’t you like to come?” 

“I would indeed! Will you excuse us?” she 
added politely to Dabney Mills, to which he 
gave a gruff assent and stalked out of sight 
around the corner of the house. She felt anx- 
ious to escape from his questions, and was 
sure that, in the hands of the determined Bea- 
trice, he could find out very little. She fetched 
her hat and her basket and set off gaily, since 
to look for berries had been a cherished pro- 
ject for some days. 

“If I could just square off and hit him,” 
Olaf said regretfully looking back for a final 
glare at Dabney, “that might settled him once 
for all.” 

rt No,” Nancy returned wisely, “it would only 
143 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


begin a lot of trouble that would involve more 
people than yourself.” 

“So John Herrick says,” the boy agreed 
with a sigh, 4 Though it still seems to me the 
simplest way out of it.” 

They scrambled up the hill, out beyond the 
shadow of the pines to the open pasture land 
where the trees had been cut, where the new 
growth was springing up, and where among 
the old stumps the berry bushes and 
vines matted the ground. It was a hot 
summer day, very still, except for the grasshop- 
pers singing shrilly, but not with that peaceful 
drowsy heat that Nancy knew. The air was 
far too bracing for any one to feel lazy or 
sleepy as on the summer days at home. The 
blue distances shimmered, the sky was cloud- 
less, everything seemed to stir and throb with 
the energy of living. The baskets filled rap- 
idly as the two went from one patch to another, 
climbing higher and higher up the mountain. 

144 


MRS. BRUIN 


Suddenly Olaf glanced over his shoulder and 
then turned about quickly. 

“Just look there,” he said in a low voice. 

Something like a big black dog was moving 
among the bushes, its smooth round back show- 
ing now and again above the tangled thicket. 
Presently, as it crossed an open space, Nancy 
saw it more clearly, with its small head, clumsy 
feet, and odd shuffling walk. She had never 
seen a bear at large before. 

“Oh,” she breathed, and dropped her basket. 

‘‘There is no need to be afraid,” Olaf assured 
her. “A bear won’t bother you at all if you 
leave him alone. They have ugly tempers, 
and if you once make them angry they will 
follow you a long way to get even. Eut this 
one won’t hurt us.” 

The creature, at first quite unconscious of 
their presence, went slowly along, snuffing 
among the roots, turning over stones to lick 
up the ants beneath them. Finally observing 
145 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


them, it stood on its hind legs to peer over a 
clump of bushes, looking so much like a shy, 
but inquisitive boy that Nancy laughed aloud. 

“Oh, see, there ’s another, two little ones,” 
she exclaimed. 

Olaf looked where she pointed and took up 
the baskets hastily. “If there are cubs it is 
quite a different thing,” he said quickly. “A 
mother bear never does anything you think 
she will. It would be better for us to go.” 

The bear stood watching their hasty depar- 
ture for a moment; then, with a grunt, dropped 
on all fours again and turned once more to the 
pursuit of her dinner. Nancy, looking back, 
caught sight of the fat, round cubs as they 
came scampering forward to run at their moth- 
er’s heels. One of them tumbled over and 
rolled upon the grass, whereupon its mother 
turned to lick it affectionately and give it a 
friendly cuff with her big paw. Evidently she 
considered the incident, so far as human be- 
ings were concerned, as being quite closed. 

146 


MRS. BRUIN 


Beatrice and Hester were at the cabin when 
the two berry pickers' returned. They de- 
clared that they had seen nothing of Dab- 
ney Mills, who had apparently taken himself 
off. They had a hilarious lunch, during which 
Beatrice imitated the airs and graces of the in- 
sistent reporter, while N ancy, as she waited on 
the table, assumed the shuffling mannerisms 
of Joe Ling. Aunt Anna declared herself so 
worn out with laughing at them that she re- 
tired early for her nap, and Beatrice presently, 
after Hester was gone, went upstairs to sleep 
also. Nancy spent a large part of the after- 
noon finishing her cake, for even the icing, 
with its alternate layers of brown and white 
was a work of art in itself. Finally the task 
was completed, however, and the dish set to 
cool on the window-ledge. When at last it be- 
came time to think about the evening meal she 
discovered that she needed fresh kindling for 
the fire and went out to the shed to fetch it. 
She opened the door and started back with a 
1 4/7 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


cry of surprise. Seated on the straw, with his 
back to the wall and his note-book on his knee, 
was Dabney Mills. 

“I heard that fellow, Olaf you call him, say 
that he was coming back at four o’clock with 
the milk, so I came back to have a word with 
him when we should n’t be disturbed. I ’ve 
been waiting quite a while. He ’s late,” he de- 
clared crossly. He got up and walked stiffly 
to the door. 

“Say,” he exclaimed, “what ’s that beside 
your window. I do believe it’s a bear!” 
His tone was one of undisguised dismay. 

“Where?” said Nancy, running out after 
him. “Oh, my cake, my cake!” she cried in 
distress. 

The same creature that she and Olaf had 
seen when they were berrying had come down 
the hill and was running an investigating and 
appreciative tongue over the icing of the pre- 
cious cake. She had been used, perhaps, to 
prowl about the cabin when it was empty and 
148 


MRS. BRUIN 


was now making herself very much at home. 
Although plainly pleased with her refresh- 
ment, she dropped down when she heard their 
voices and began to shamble off toward the 
sheltering underbrush. 

“Let her go quietly,” Nancy warned, “don’t 
disturb her, don’t, don’t !” 

Dabney Mills plucking up courage at the 
animal’s willingness to depart, was attempting 
to speed her going by throwing stones after 
her. Picking up a square block of wood from 
beside the shed, he flung it with unfortunate 
success, in spite of Nancy’s catching at his arm. 
It caught the bear full on the side of the head. 

She turned, bared all her teeth in an angry 
snarl, and rushed upon them. Without cere- 
mony they fled, past the shed, away from the 
house, and up the hill. To reach the safety of 
the cabin, they would have to pass by her, 
which at the moment was unthinkable. There- 
fore, as the angry creature climbed steadily 
after them, they were forced further and fur- 
149 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


ther up toward the open spaces of the moun- 
tain. 

“I ’m not afraid. She won’t hurt us,” 
Nancy kept telling herself, though her teeth 
were chattering and her breath was coming 
short. Bewildered as she was, she still had 
presence of mind enough to try to bend their 
course in a circle so that at last they might 
come nearer home. But no such coolness pos- 
sessed her companion. Excited, almost hys- 
terical with terror, he shouted at the bear, 
waved his arms, and threw sticks and stones at 
her every time the steep trail afforded him op- 
portunity. 

“Stop, don’t, you are only making it worse,” 
Nancy begged him breathlessly, but he was 
far too terrified to pay any heed to her words. 

Nancy felt that there could be nothing more 
terrible than this big swaying body that 
came up the hill after them, the little pointed 
head with its white teeth showing, its small 
eyes blazing with an animal’s unreasoning fury. 

150 


MRS. BRUIN 


She was panting and exhausted, her knees 
shook under her, it seemed utterly impossible 
to go farther. One last hope flashed through 
her mind: it was the hour for Olaf to bring the 
milk and he might be somewhere below, com- 
ing through the pines. She hollowed her 
hands before her mouth and, with a final effort 
of her panting lungs, shouted with all her 
might : 

“Olaf, Olaf.” 

A faint hail came in answer. How far 
away it was! Would he know what had hap- 
pened? 

There was only a little further for them to 
climb, for a long ridge of rock, shouldering 
up through the underbrush, cut off their as- 
cent with its smooth wall that offered no foot- 
hold. Beside it the mountain-side fell away in 
a sheer drop of a hundred feet of precipice so 
that their retreat was blocked completely. A 
vast furry form rose through the bushes beside 
them, and the bear struck at them with her 
151 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


great paw. Nancy was too bewildered to un- 
derstand how Dabney Mills came suddenly 
to be behind her, while she was thrust for- 
ward into the very face of their enemy. The 
blow missed her, however, and struck the boy, 
just where she could not see. With a strange 
sickening sigh, he dropped and rolled toward 
the edge of the cliff. Nancy flattened herself 
against the rock wall, staring, fascinated, as 
the bear settled her haunches firmly, seemed 
to pause a moment, and then squared off to 
strike at her again. 


152 


CHAPTER IX 


A DECISION 

I T was not easy for either Nancy or Olaf 
to give any connected account afterward 
of their adventure with the bear. Nancy 
could never describe it clearly at all, and Olaf, 
when questioned, gave a very simple version 
of the rescue. 

“I saw the bear striking at them when I 
came near, so I just whanged her over the 
head with the milk-bucket, and she beat it.” 

Dabney Mills, who had no knowledge at the 
time of what was happening, was able, per- 
haps, to give the most picturesque story of 
the three. Not even he, however, was able 
to deny that it was the milk-pail that saved 
the day. Olaf had been carrying it on his 
arm when he heard Nancy’s frantic cry for 
153 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


help, and he had never thought of setting it 
down, nor did he spill quite all of the contents 
as he ran to help her. He had come panting 
up the slope, just in time to see the bear’s blow 
graze the girl’s shoulder and rip away her 
sleeve. Being still out of reach, he had hurled 
the unwieldy tin bucket with all his might and 
with most successful aim. The clanging blow 
with which it struck startled Nancy, and the 
unexpected spectacle of a stream of white milk 
pouring over those black, furry shoulders 
made her feel that she had been bereft of her 
senses. 

“And I have seen,” she said when she was 
trying to relate the tale to Beatrice, “what no- 
body else ever saw; I have seen a bear look 
surprised.” 

Astonishment and horror seemed, indeed, to 
take instant possession of Mrs. Bruin, for she 
dropped from the ledge and made off through 
the bushes. The milk-pail, dislodged from 
154 


A DECISION 


where it had caught among the stones, rolled 
clanging and banging after her with a noise 
that lent even greater speed to her flight. 

Olaf and Nancy stared at each other for a 
moment while his anxious face relaxed slowly 
into a broad grin and she burst out into ir- 
repressible giggles. The strain of the terrible 
minutes that had just passed broke down sud- 
denly into uncontrollable mirth so that gale 
after gale of laughter swept over them both. 
Nancy was so breathless from her desperate 
climb that laughing was painful, yet she could 
not check it and was forced to sit down upon 
the grass and lean against the rock wall in her 
helplessness. Olaf recovered first, rubbed his 
eyes, wet with laughter, on the sleeve of his 
coat, and was able to speak quite soberly. 

“After all, it is n’t so funny,” he observed. 
He leaned far out over the precipice and 
looked down. “ I thought you would go over 
before I got there.” 


155 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


“We must look after Dabney Mills,” Nancy 
reminded him suddenly. “Suppose he had 
been killed!” 

“If he had it would be by no fault of his,” 
Olaf muttered as he helped her to her feet 
and walked with her to where the reporter was 
sitting up, looking about him with a dazed ex- 
pression. 

“You were mighty slow coming,” he said 
morosely to Olaf. “That brute could have 
knocked us into kingdom come.” 

He was feeling about vaguely, first in his 
pockets, then among the weeds and stones 
about him. A great blue bruise was spread- 
ing slowly over his face and neck. 

“Have you lost something?” Nancy in- 
quired. 

“Just my note-book. I — I wanted to put 
something down in it.” 

He seemed still to be somewhat stunned, 
but he got up and went with them down the 
hill. For some time he was silent, an unusual 
156 


A DECISION 


condition for him, but before they were half- 
way home he began to talk again, evidently 
composing a proper account of his adventure. 

“A very dangerous, vicious animal!” he ob- 
served. “It was quite touch and go for a 
time, a very narrow escape! Of course, if I 
had been carrying any sort of weapon — ” 
Nancy interrupted with an exclamation, and 
Olaf with a covert chuckle. She was about 
to declare very frankly that if Olaf had been 
unarmed and Dabney possessed of the milk- 
bucket, the affair would not have been very 
different. Olaf, however, dropped behind and 
spoke to her in an undertone: 

“Please let him go on. He will talk him- 
self into believing he was quite a hero, and I 
want to hear him do it.” 

Aunt Anna was given a very mild account 
of the affair when they reached home, with 
little emphasis on the danger and a great deal 
on how absurd the bear had looked. Yet her 
eyes fell upon the deep scratches on Nancy’s 
157 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


arm and her torn sleeve, and then turned to 
Olaf with a look that made him suddenly glow 
with embarrassment and pride, but also made 
him bid them a panic-stricken good night. 
When Aunt Anna’s glance traveled to Dab- 
ney Mills who was beginning to relate his ver- 
sion of the story quite fluently, he paused, 
stammered, and declared that he, too, must be 
going. There was no one present who pres- 
sed him to stay. 

“I will have to give this to Hester for her 
chickens,” said Nancy, surveying the wreck of 
her cake ruefully, just before she went to bed. 

The girls had promised their aunt that they 
would not talk a great deal before they went 
to sleep, but they found it difficult to keep 
their word. Besides discussing the bear ad- 
venture they had also to talk over Dr. Min- 
turn’s advice to Beatrice given that morning 
and heard by Nancy now for the first time. 

“He said,” quoted Beatrice, “ ‘that we 
158 


A DECISION 


must not hurry a man who has been hurt to 
his very soul.’ ” 

“I think the doctor was right,” the younger 
girl observed thoughtfully. “John Herrick 
— I can’t seem to call him anything else — must 
he just like Aunt Anna, with just such a will 
as hers. And the more he loved his family 
the more it must have hurt him to believe that 
they doubted his honor.” 

“But suppose he never comes back to us,” 
said Beatrice. “Must we sit by and do noth- 
ing? He knew who we were from the first 
day we came here, but he has never made a 
sign.” 

Although they had put out the light, the 
glowing hands of Beatrice’s wrist-watch re- 
minded her of her promise. Nancy accord- 
ingly scurried into her own room to bed, and 
presumably dropped asleep as quickly as did 
Beatrice, who could hardly even remember lay- 
ing her head upon the pillow. 

159 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


It must have been several hours later that 
Beatrice awoke. She had slept so soundly 
that all her weariness was gone and the faint- 
est of sounds outside had broken through the 
thin fabric of her dreams. She sat up, and 
turned to the window close beside her bed, to 
peer out and to listen. 

It was moonlight again — a very clear night 
and so quiet that the big pine-trees stood as 
immovable as though they were a painted for- 
est on the drop curtain of a theater. The 
white flood of light set into sharp relief the 
square frame of the window. Beatrice, look- 
ing at the ruffled white curtains, the twin pots 
of berries on the sill, and the row of books be- 
low, thought how quaintly cozy and homelike 
it looked in contrast to that ghostly wilderness 
outside. Then, as she leaned against the 
frame to look out, she drew a deep breath of 
astonishment. 

Very evidently Aunt Anna had been unable 
to sleep and was sitting, wrapped in her big 
160 


A DECISION 


cloak, reading at the window just below, as 
was often her custom. A square of light on 
the ground below, and a shadow that moved a 
little now and then, as though for the turning 
of a page, made it plain that this was so. And 
opposite the window, in a clearing among the 
pines, some one was walking to and fro. It 
was John Herrick, with the moonlight on his 
fair hair and flooding the ground about him 
like a pool of still water. Somewhere in the 
dark behind him his horse was tied, for Bea- 
trice, when she listened, could hear now and 
then the faint stamping of an impatient foot 
or the jingle of the bit. 

If Aunt Anna heard the sounds, she did not 
distinguish them from the ordinary noises of 
the night, nor, with the lighted lamp beside 
her, could she see clearly anything that lay in 
the forest beyond. But Beatrice could guess, 
as surely as though she stood in the moonlight 
beside John Herrick, just how distinct before 
his eyes was the lighted window with his sister 
1I6I 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


sitting beside it. She could imagine, even, 
just what that picture must mean to him, the 
glowing, shaded lamp, the cushioned chair, 
the quiet beauty of Aunt Anna’s profile. 
How they must all stand for home and fa- 
miliar things, for the unswerving affection of 
those of his own blood. He must know, 
surely, why his sister had come there, what 
she was waiting for as she sat, unconscious and 
serene, beside the window. He had only to 
lift his voice ever so little above the whispers 
of the forest; he had only to speak her name 
and the long spell would be broken. Beatrice 
held her breath to listen. There was no sound. 

He stood, staring up at the window for a 
long, long time ; then turned upon his heel at 
last. Beatrice could actually hear the harsh 
grating of his heavy boot upon a stone as he 
did so. She heard the jingling of the curb as 
he loosed his horse ; she heard the creak of the 
stirrup leather and the scramble of iron-shod 
162 



He had only to lift his voice and the long spell would be broken 



























* 








A DECISION 


'feet as he swung into the saddle and was off. 
There was no hesitation or stopping to look 
hack ; it was as though he had come to a final 
decision. Beatrice felt that there was some- 
thing very ominous, something dismaying in 
the steadily diminishing thud, thud, of the 
hoof-beats, as horse and rider drew away into 
the darkness. With a long sigh she turned, 
shivering, from the window and buried her 
face in the pillow. 

Christina came up the hill to see them next 
day, a radiant Christina who had learned that 
she need no longer keep secret from her 
friends her joy in Olaf’s return. The pro- 
mise of the brilliant moonlight had not been 
fulfilled in the morning’s weather, for deluges 
of rain were falling, sluicing down the steep 
roof, dripping from the trees, and swelling the 
stream until the sound of the waterfall filled 
the whole house. No amount of rain could 
quench the Finnish woman’s happiness, how- 
163 


[THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


ever, as she stood in the kitchen, her garments 
soaked and her face beaming. 

“It seemed so wrong to keep the good news 
from you, when it was really through Miss 
Beatrice that Olaf came home. I would 
never have dared to ask any one to write to 
him in the face of Thorvik’s forbidding it. 
Olaf came very early one morning, when 
Thorvik happened to be away for the night, 
and we went straight up to see John Herrick, 
for he was always the best friend my boy had. 
He made Olaf promise that he would not show 
himself in the village, and I know myself that 
it is wise that he should keep away after that 
business at Mason’s Bluff, but it is hard for 
me to see so little of him.” 

Of her son’s adventure with the bear she 
made very light indeed. 

“He did nothing more than he should,” she 
declared. “Of course, he might have been 
hurt, but there was that dear Miss Nancy; 
think what might have come to her!” 

164 


A DECISION 


Her presence in the kitchen was very wel- 
come, for Nancy’s arm was too stiff to be of 
much service, and Beatrice admitted frankly 
that as cook she was a sorry substitute. 

“Willing but awkward, I would describe 
myself if I were advertising for a situation,” 
she told them. “Nancy has a special talent 
for cooking, but I have a genius for breaking 
dishes and scalding myself.” 

Christina, therefore, stayed to cook the din- 
ner and to bake a second edition of the cake 
upon which misfortune had fallen yesterday. 
Olaf came across the hill through the rain and 
sat for long in the kitchen with his mother, 
making her the most peaceful and uninter- 
rupted visit that had been possible since his re- 
turn. Nancy, going in and out on various er- 
rands, heard snatches of tales of the high seas, 
of whales and hurricanes, of hot foreign ports 
baking in the tropical sun, of winds that cut 
you like a knife as you slid across the slippery 
decks with great waves washing over you, of 
165 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the longing for the land and home, and also — 
Olaf came to it slowly — of the restless desire 
that grows and grows, of the sailor on leave 
to be at sea again. 

“Ah, but you wouldn’t go just yet!” cried 
Christina in alarm. 

“No, not just yet. John Herrick has been 
so kind to me that I feel like standing by him 
in — in something that he has on hand just 
now.” But Olaf leaned back in his chair and 
looked out through the blurred windows as 
though he were already impatient to be off. 

They were an oddly assorted pair, he so 
tall, straight, and American, she, despite her 
ordinary clothes and her careful English, so 
foreign still. Beatrice thought so, as she 
came into the kitchen in the late afternoon, 
and found them both making preparations to 
depart. The day had been a long and heavy 
one to her. Her mind was full of what she 
had seen the night before, although she had 
not yet had time to discuss it in private with 
166 


A DECISION 


Nancy. She longed to ride over to the Her- 
ricks’ house, for what purpose she could not 
herself say. The pouring rain, however, 
made such an expedition so unreasonable that 
she could not, in the whole course of the day, 
think of an excuse urgent enough to explain 
her going. 

“I wish you were not going to be so wet,” 
she said to Christina. “You will be soaked 
again before you get home.” 

“It is not raining so much now,” Olaf ob- 
served, reaching for his cap that lay on the 
window-sill, “it will soon — ” 

He interrupted himself suddenly and turned 
round to them with a delighted grin. He 
spoke softly and jerked his head toward the 
window where, to Beatrice’s astonishment, she 
saw dimly through the wet pane that a face 
was peering in. The close-set eyes and un- 
gainly nose showed that it was Dabney Mills. 

“I never knew before just what the word 
eavesdropper meant,” said Olaf. “Think how 
167 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

the water must be pouring off the roof and 
running down that fellow’s neck!” 

Seeing that he had been observed, Dabney 
came to the door and a moment later stood, a 
bedraggled and dejected figure, just inside 
the threshold. 

“I was looking in to see if there was any 
one at home,” he tried to explain, while Olaf 
supplemented : 

“On such a fine day he was afraid you might 
all be out.” 

“I went up the mountain to see if I could 
get back my note-book,” Dabney went on to 
account for his forlorn condition. “I have 
been looking for hours, but I could n’t find it.” 

“Maybe the bear put it in her pocket and 
went away with it,” suggested Christina flip- 
pantly. “Anyway, it would be soaked to a 
pulp by this time.” 

“You needn’t worry, I picked it up last 
night when I went back to get the milk-can,” 
Olaf said. He brought the familiar leather- 
168 


A DECISION 


covered book from an inside pocket and held it 
out to its owner. A wicked twinkle that he 
could not suppress seemed to fill Dabney 
Mills with panic-stricken suspicion. 

“You’ve been reading it,” he cried. “You 
had no right. You have been prying into my 
private affairs.” 

The other boy’s face flushed with anger. 

“It may be I have n’t been brought up a 
gentleman like you,” he returned hotly. “But 
I would n’t be peering and prying into other 
people’s business for all that. Whatever 
mean secrets you have hid away in that book, 
they are there still, safe and sound. All I 
did was to write a page at the end. I was 
afraid that if you did n’t have an account of 
that bear business at once, you might forget 
just how it happened.” 

Dabney snatched the book and nervously 
turned to the last page. Beatrice was so close 
that she could not help seeing that it was 
covered with Olaf’s square schoolboy writing. 

169 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


The last sentence caught her eye, giving a clue 
to the rest. 

“Even though our hero took the precaution 
of getting behind the lady who was with him, 
he did not escape entirely unharmed.” 

Dabney thrust the book into his pocket and 
shot Olaf a glance of wicked rage. 

“I am very much obliged to you,” he said. 
“You shall hear of my gratitude later. I 
know more about you than you think, young 
man.” 

He went out into the rain, slamming the 
door behind him. 


170 


CHAPTER X 


dabney's clue 

I T was still raining next morning, which 
was, as Aunt Anna said, “a merciful pro- 
vidence, considering how much mending there 
is to do, and how little we stay indoors to do 
it on a bright day.” 

They sat around the fire talking and sew- 
ing busily, for it was true that much had been 
neglected in the enjoyment of other things. 
Beatrice, the least enthusiastic seamstress of 
the three, was the one whose wardrobe needed 
the most repair, since her scrambles over the 
mountains had wrought more ruin than she 
had realized. If Aunt Anna had not mended 
the rent in her riding skirt and Nancy had not 
sewed up the rip in her sheepskin coat, she 
would never have come to the end. 

171 


the hill oe adventure 


“I seem to have strewed the whole State of 
Montana over with buttons,” she declared 
with a sigh, “but, oh, how much I have seen 
while I have been doing it! If it is still rain- 
ing to-morrow, I think Buck will kick out the 
side of his stall, he is so impatient to be off 
again, and so am I.” 

There was a promise of clearing at sunset, 
for the clouds began to lift, and patches of 
blue sky showed to the westward, a hopeful 
sign for the morrow. The peak of Gray 
Cloud Mountain, visible from their doorstep, 
loomed through the mist that had shrouded it 
from view and before dark showed its tower- 
ing outline, clear-cut against the clouds. And 
never, never, so Beatrice and Nancy thought, 
had they seen a more glorious day than the 
morrow turned out to be. With the whole 
world washed clean, with the dripping water 
dried up in an hour by the all-conquering sun- 
shine, it seemed that nothing could be more 
perfect. 


172 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


Before they had finished breakfast, there 
was a loud trampling of hoofs outside, an- 
nouncing a cavalcade — Hester Herrick on her 
pinto pony, Dr. Mintum with her, and Olaf 
riding behind leading a packhorse. 

“It is the day of all days for a picnic,” 
Hester announced. “All the time you have 
been here, we have talked of going to Eagle 
Rock, and you promised to come with me the 
first day I could arrange it. Christina will 
spend the day with Miss Deems, this horse 
that Olaf is on will do for Nancy to ride; and 
everything we could possibly need is packed 
on old Martha here. Dr. Minturn rode by 
our house this morning, and thought he would 
come over with me; though he is in a hurry 
to get to the village. He will come back this 
evening after we have got home to make your 
aunt a real, proper visit. Do say you will 
come.” 

Her eagerness and the inviting beauty of 
the day were not to be denied, so that in a 
173 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

moment Nancy and Beatrice were running 
to and fro in hasty preparation. 

‘‘Bring warm coats and your swimming 
suits and hurry,” Hester directed. “Olaf will 
saddle Buck while you are getting ready.” 

It was well that Olaf was there to deal with 
Beatrice’s pony, for with the gathered energy 
of two days’ vacation, Buck went through all 
the tricks in his repertoire during the cinching 
of the saddle. He was off down the trail like 
an arrow the moment his mistress was in the 
saddle, leaving the others .trailing far behind. 
They came together soon, however, and 
climbed merrily upward, looking back at the 
valley mapped out below them and at the bare, 
brown slopes of the range opposite. They 
looked so near in the clear air that Beatrice 
shouted, “to see if there would be an echo.” 

“Hardly,” commented Hester, “for they 
are twenty miles away.” 

Beatrice tried many times, as they went 
along, to think of some question to put to 
174 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


Hester that might bring forth information 
about John Herrick, but no matter how often 
she led up to it, she was never able to think 
what to say. She had told Nancy of that 
strange scene in the moonlight, and she was 
afraid now of her sister’s blunt frankness, 
should the talk touch upon that matter of which 
both their minds were so full. In the end, 
therefore, she said nothing. 

They reached Eagle Rock well before noon, 
unsaddled their horses, removed the generous 
bundles of lunch from the back of the willing 
pack-pony, and turned all four out to graze. 
Above them rose abruptly a huge gray mass 
of granite, set in the midst of a smooth slope 
of grass and scrubby trees. A clear stream 
swept in a curve below the foot of the rock, 
spread to a broad pool, and then ran babbling 
out of sight among the trees. Hester, who 
was, in her own sphere, a capable and self- 
reliant young person, showed them how to 
hobble the horses lest they stray too far, how 
175 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

to build a fireplace of stones with its back to 
the wind, and then brought out her fishing 
tackle and set about teaching the two girls 
how to catch rainbow trout. 

Beatrice succeeded very badly, displaying 
a great talent for tangling her hook in the 
bushes when she tried to learn to cast. She 
laid down her rod after a little, stretched her- 
self upon her back on the warm grass, and 
fell to watching the fleet of towering white 
clouds that went drifting overhead. One of 
them, which looked even more than the others 
like a tall vessel with curved and shining sails, 
had come to grief on the jagged shoulder of 
Gray Cloud Mountain and hung there, beat- 
ing itself to pieces, growing thinner and thin- 
ner as it spread out in long wreaths across 
the glowing blue sky. Some of Beatrice's 
cares and worries seemed to be fading from 
her mind in much the same way, blown afar 
by the brisk, warm gusts of wind. 

“I believe everything will come out right 
175 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


after all,” she thought, “and I shall know, 
when the time comes, what I ought to do.” 

She got up at last and went to join the 
others, who greeted her with reproaches for 
having made so little effort to catch any fish. 

Nancy, more patient and painstaking, had 
come into better fortune. She had learned 
to cast, after a fashion, and had managed to 
dangle her gay-colored fly in the water at the 
edge of a riffle just as Hester had instructed 
her. Then came the first tug at her line, a 
magic quiver which seemed to send an electric 
shock of excitement all up her arm. In that 
second she became a fisherman. 

They landed twelve trout between them, 
although Hester’s share was by far the greater, 
and they ate all twelve for the lunch that they 
spread on a flat, sun-warmed shelf of Eagle 
Rock. Such a feast as it was, with sizzling 
fried bacon, toasted cheese sandwiches, hot 
cocoa, and the trout cooked to a turn by Hes- 
ter. Afterward they sat and talked for a 

m 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


very long time, talked of everything and of 
nothing, until Hester jumped up and said 
there was only just time for a swim before 
going home. 

“I did not know,” said Nancy a little doubt- 
fully, “that swimming was one of the usual 
sports in the Rocky Mountains.” 

‘‘Most of the water is too cold to be pleas- 
ant,” replied Hester, “but this pool is warm 
enough. It is the only one I know of. Roddy 
found it long ago, and taught me to swim 
here. He says perhaps it was beavers that 
helped to dam it and went away years before 
we discovered it. The stream is fed by melted 
snow, like all the others, but it runs very shal- 
low for miles above here, out in the open 
where the sun can warm it. By mid-after- 
noon, like this, it is not cold at all.” 

She donned her bathing suit and dropped 
into the water with a splash. After a moment 
of doubt and hesitation, her two friends fol- 
lowed. 


178 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


“Oh!” cried Beatrice and “Oh,” echoed 
Nancy, “I did not know it would be like this!” 

A person who has never bathed in the clear, 
rock pools of the high mountainsides cannot 
know what real exhilaration is. The two 
girls caught their breath with delight and won- 
der, with a pleasure that was quite indescrib- 
able. To plunge into the crystal-blue water, 
to know that it has poured down from the 
vast glaciers and great, empty snow-fields 
where no human foot ever comes, to feel all 
the tingling freshness of the water without its 
deadly cold — there are few things like it in 
the world. The girls laughed and splashed 
and swam and floated until Hester warned 
them that is was not wise to stay in too long, 
and they came out reluctantly to dry them- 
selves in the sun. 

They scrambled almost to the top of Eagle 
Rock, found a shelf that was sheltered from 
the wind, and sat down in a row, swinging 
their feet over the void beneath and looking 
179 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


out over the long ranges of hills and moun- 
tains, brown, russet, red, and chrome-yellow, 
fading to the blue peaks in the far distance. 

“That must be a mountain sheep, that dot 
moving there opposite us,” Hester observed. 
“And you can see Gray Cloud Pass over be- 
yond the shoulder of this nearest hill. The 
tuft of green above is that stretch of woods 
growing around the lake, but see how bare the 
slope is where it goes up beyond — nothing but 
solid rock and overhanging cliffs to the very 
top. There is a little trail that picks its way 
back and forth over the face of the mountain; 
it is called Dead Man’s Mile, there is so much 
danger, just there, from unsteady footing and 
rocks falling from above.” 

Beatrice remembered how she had come to 
grief even on the lower, easier slope, and shud- 
dered at the thought of the difficulties higher 
up. 

“Yet I should like to climb it,” she thought. 

180 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


The very impossibility of the idea made it seem 
all the more inviting. 

They sat there even after they were dry, 
but finally Hester, with a sigh, declared they 
must go. 

“It has been such a pleasant day,” she said, 
“I hate to have it end. We — we are n’t very 
happy at home, just now, Roddy and I.” 

“What!” exclaimed Nancy. “What can be 
the matter?” 

“I don’t know,” Hester answered hopelessly. 
“I really brought you here so that we could 
talk about it, but it has been so hard to speak 
that I haven’t said anything, and now it is 
time to go home. Long ago Roddy used to 
be like this sometimes. He would look wor- 
ried and troubled for days and at last would 
go off, camping in the hills, hunting and fish- 
ing and thinking things out, and he would 
come home quite cheerful again. That was 
long, long past; I had almost forgotten it, 
but now it has all come back again. He is 
181 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


miserable and restless, and troubled over some- 
thing I can’t understand. Just last night he 
asked me the strangest thing. He wanted to 
know if I could be happy in some other place 
if he decided not to live here any longer. And 
I had thought he loved Gray Cloud Mountain 
best of any place in the world !” 

If John Herrick did not tell her his secret, 
they had no right to do so. Such was the un- 
spoken message that passed between the sisters 
as Nancy tried to offer comfort, with very lit- 
tle success. 

“I suppose there is no use in talking of it,” 
said little Hester at last with a sigh. “Things 
may be better some time. Well, we must be 
going home. Climb down, and I will show 
you how to throw the diamond hitch on a pack- 
horse.” 

The ride home was less hilarious than their 
setting out had been, and Beatrice and Nancy 
went up the path to the cabin with no very 
light hearts. In the evening, however, they 
182 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


were made happy again by a visit from Dr. 
Minturn and his very good report of Aunt 
Anna. 

“I could not ask for anything better,” he 
declared, fully as delighted as were they. The 
beaming warmth of his smile seemed to light 
the whole room. 

“I have something to propose,” he went on. 
“Nancy here has come to be more of a rider 
than she was when I visited you before, and I 
have been wondering if she would go over the 
pass with me to-morrow and spend a few days 
with Miriam. Mrs. Minturn has asked me 
over and over again if she couldn’t learn to 
know both the girls, and this is a good chance. 
Beatrice can ride over to come back with her, 
since she should not go over the trail alone.” 

It was difficult to persuade Nancy to leave 
her housekeeping, but arguments prevailed at 
last and she set off next morning, with many 
last messages and instructions to Beatrice, and 
with a great deal of pleasure and excitement 
183 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

shining in her eyes. John Herrick had sent 
over the same horse she had ridden yesterday, 
a gentle creature on which she was more com- 
fortable than when mounted upon the gay 
spirited Buck. Beatrice was to follow in 
three days to come back with her. The house 
seemed very empty without her busy presence, 
and Olaf, when he came with the milk, de- 
clared that nothing was the same at all with 
Miss Nancy gone. 

“And things aren’t very cheerful where I 
live, either,” he said. “Miss Hester has been 
crying, and that Dabney Mills has been hang- 
ing around the place. He brings no good with 
him, whatever he comes for.” 

Beartice was not inclined to take the ama- 
teur detective very seriously; but, she was con- 
cerned indeed to hear that Hester was still 
unhappy. She was desirous of riding over to 
see her, but her unpractised skill as a house- 
wife made it difficult for her to find a spare 
18 4 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


moment. Most of the next day passed with- 
out her having time for visiting, but when 
evening came she was ordered by Aunt Anna 
to go out for a little, since she had toiled in 
the house all day. As there was not time 
enough for a ride, she strolled down the path 
under the pines and stood at the bars of the 
gate, watching the slow tide of shadows creep 
up the hillsides opposite. For so long a time 
did she stand there that when two figures came 
down the hill from the direction of John Her- 
rick’s house it was too dark to see who they 
were, and they were only to be recognized by 
their voices. The loudness of their speech in- 
dicated that neither Olaf nor Dabney Mills 
was in a friendly mood. 

“We give you warning,” Olaf was saying, 
“that you are not to come on John Herrick’s 
place again. Y ou are to ask no more questions 
of anybody. You are to put that note-book 
in your pocket and shut your mouth and get 
185 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


out. If you show yourself here again, you will 
get something that will make what you took 
from the bear seem like a love-pat.” 

“You warn me? Who are you, giving or- 
ders?” Dabney Mills thrust his face forward 
sharply and spoke almost into the other ’s. 
“Who are you? That ’s what I ’m asking?” 

Olaf hesitated, then swung about without re- 
plying and strode off up the hill. 

“Imposter!” cried Dabney after him. 
“Liar!” He caught sight suddenly of Bea- 
trice beside the gate and changed his manner 
quickly. 

“Good evening,” he said pleasantly, “might 
I ask ” 

He had glanced upward toward Olaf, dis- 
appearing in the dusk, so that Beatrice guessed 
the question concerned him, and interrupted. 

“There is no use in your asking me any- 
thing,” she said. “We are all very tired of 
your questions, and think you have no right to 
ask them.” 


186 


DABNEY’S CLUE 

“Oh, I don’t want to inquire about him,” 
returned Dabney, indicating Olaf with a jerk 
of his thumb. “I know who he is all right — 
Christina’s boy that went off to sea, and that 
has such a warm welcome waiting for him in 
Ely. I found out who he was the day the 
bear knocked me out. I came to and saw him 
hanging over that precipice and I knew, all 
in a minute, that only a sailor could have the 
head to do such a thing. I had my suspi- 
cions before, and I only needed that to make 
me sure.” 

‘‘If you tell about him in the village,” said 
Beatrice, growing rather indiscreet in the 
defense of Olaf, “he may have something 
to tell about you and my sister and the 
bear.” 

“Oh, I don’t care to talk very much about 
him for a while,” Dabney declared hastily. 
“It ’s another person I have my eye on — bigger 
game than Olaf Jensen. I ’m trying to find 
out who took that money and broke up the 
187 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


work down in Ely. And I ’ve about found 
out, too.” 

He gave her a long meaning look and turned 
away. 

“Wait!” cried Beatrice. “You don’t mean 

that you think Olaf ” She could not go 

on. 

“What ’s he hanging around here for, afraid 
to show himself and afraid to go away? Oh, 
he ’s in it all right ; he may even have done the 
actual stealing, but not just for himself. 
There ’s some one else involved — some one 
higher up. I ’ll soon be able to tell who took 
the company’s money and wrecked the whole 
project.” 

“Who?” the question broke from Beatrice in 
a cry of anger, but she felt also a sickening 
dread and foreboding of what his answer 
would be. 

“Oh, I ’m not telling — yet,” he replied, quite 
restored to his usual impudent calm. “He ’s a 
fellow that it will be hard to prove anything 
188 


DABNEY’S CLUE 


against. Most people, even the laborers, talk 
pretty well of him, and nobody knows any- 
thing to his discredit. Nobody knows very 
much about him at all, as far as I can make 
out. But I ’ve got my proofs all lined up and 

with just a little more ” 

“Who?” cried Beatrice desperately again. 
Dabney Mills merely jerked his thumb to- 
ward where the lights of John Herrick’s house 
were shining among the trees. Even as they 
looked up, the door opened, showing, silhouet- 
ted against the light within, Hester and John 
Herrick standing on the threshold. He 
turned as though to bid her good-by, then 
strode down the steps without looking back. 
She stood, however, with the door still open 
and the light streaming out, so that they could 
see him mount his horse and ride away up the 
trail into the mountains. 

“Yes,” said Dabney, “that ’s the one.” 

But Beatrice did not answer. 


189 


CHAPTER XI 


OYER THE PASS 

T HROUGH all the night following Dab- 
ney Mills’ veiled accusation of John 
Herrick, Beatrice slept very little. A tireless 
procession of thoughts went trooping through 
her weary mind: Aunt Anna’s story of her 
brother, that strange vision of John Herrick 
walking back and forth in the moonlight, the 
sight of his departure. What did all these 
things mean in the end? Perhaps John Her- 
rick had gone away forever, perhaps Dabney 
Mills had real proofs of — no, no that could 
not be! Come what might, she would never 
believe anything against John Herrick. It 
was a help, at least, to think that next day she 
was to go over the pass to bring Nancy back, 
and that she could ask the advice of Dr. Min- 
190 


OVER THE PASS 


turn. He alone could be trusted with knowl- 
edge of both sides of the affair ; he would give 
her counsel from a wise and friendly heart. 
The comfort of this thought brought her sleep 
at last. 

As early as she could make ready, she set 
off next morning. She stopped for a minute 
at the door of the Herrick’s house, hoping 
to hear that she had been mistaken in her 
understanding of what she had seen. But no, 
Hester met her at the door with heavy eyes and 
told her that John Herrick had gone away very 
suddenly, “soon after that horrid boy, Dabney 
Mills, had been here. He took his tent and 
quite a supply of food. He may have been 
planning to camp several days, but he did n’t 
tell me where or why. He just said, ‘so-long 
Hester; better luck by and by,’ and galloped 
away.” 

Much disheartened, Beatrice turned her 
horse’s head to the trail and began to mount 
steadily the zigzag path that led to Gray 
191 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

Cloud Pass. The way had grown familiar 
now, so that instead of looking out at the wide 
panorama of mountains or gazing ahead to 
search out the trail, she was free to observe 
smaller things: a hollow tree with an owl’s 
nest in it from which a red-brown head with in- 
quisitive round eyes was thrust to watch her 
pass; the busy little gophers that popped in 
and out of their holes at her approach, con- 
sumed by both curiosity and alarm; the awk- 
ward, unhurried porcupine that crossed the 
trail ahead of her and disappeared into the 
brush. She knew well that the forest about 
her must be alive with tiny, bright eyes and 
sharp, peering little faces, but she had neither 
time nor patience to watch for them. So full 
was she of surging hopes and desires, her 
one idea was to push forward. To seek ad- 
vice, find out what was the best thing to do, 
and then do it — those were the only things that 
would bring her peace of mind. 

The day was not so clear as yesterday had 
192 


OVER THE PASS 


been. The sun shone with less warmth, even 
as noon approached, the hills were dun-color 
and the far mountains purple instead of blue. 
Beatrice was not weather-wise enough to know 
just what such conditions meant, nor could she 
have hurried forward more impatiently if she 
had. Even the willing Buck finally protested 
against the haste she demanded of him and re- 
fused to increase his speed even when she 
touched him with the whip. 

There was a certain level stretch of ground 
that she remembered, a nook between two 
rocks, with the stream splashing below. She 
was determined to reach this spot before 
she stopped to eat her lunch, although noon 
had passed and she was beginning to be hun- 
gry. She finally came up the last rise of the 
steep path, breathless with haste, and did not 
observe the curl of blue smoke that was go- 
ing up from behind the rocks. Dismounting, 
and with Buck’s bridle over her arm, she turned 
the corner of the wall of rock to find her picnic 
193 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


ground occupied. A little fire was burning 
between two stones, a string of trout hung be- 
fore it, and a slim black mare grazed lazily 
beside the mountain wall. The man who 
turned to greet her was John Herrick. 

Her mind had been so full of thoughts of 
him that for a moment it seemed impossible to 
speak to him naturally. He also stood, sur- 
prised and nonplussed, apparently unable to 
utter a word. He took Buck’s bridle from her 
at last and, still in silence, loosened the girths, 
lifted off the saddle, and let the horse roll 
luxuriously on the grass. 

“You have ridden him too hard,” he said 
at length, looking at Buck’s wet sides and 
wide nostrils. “Not even a mountain-bred 
pony can stand such a pace. Why, did you 
hurry so? Was there anything the matter?” 

“N-no,” replied Beatrice doubtfully. She 
could not have told him why she had been in 
such impatient haste; perhaps she could not 
even explain it to herself. Certainly she was 
194f 


OVER THE PASS 


in no hurry to go forward now, but knelt down 
by the fire and fell to turning the trout, while 
he picketed her horse and spread a blanket 
for her to sit on. As she looked up to thank 
him she saw that the heavy cloud that had been 
visible on his face when she first saw him was 
lifted now, making him look his smiling, cheer- 
ful self again. It was as though her chance 
coming had done him good. 

The picnic yesterday had been merry, but 
this one, somehow seemed gayer still. They 
joked and laughed as they shared in the pre- 
parations; he tried to teach her how to make 
flapjacks and laughed at her awkwardness 
when she attempted to toss them ; she criticized 
his method of boiling coffee and made him ad- 
mit that hers was better. As they sat eating 
he told her tales of past camping adventures; 
how he had once crawled into a cavern under a 
cliff to take shelter from the rain and had dis- 
covered that it was the home of a most unami- 
able mountain lion; how, in his tent, far up on 
195 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


Gray Cloud Mountain, a grizzly bear cub had 
slipped under the canvas and invited itself to 
share his bed. 

“And I had to be polite to the pushing, 
grunting little beast,” he said, “for its mother 
and my rifle were both outside.” 

After they had finished their lunch they still 
sat lazily by the fire, watching the thin smoke 
drift far across the depths below them until 
it lost itself in the distant blue haze. Beatrice 
was leaning against the warm rock while her 
companion sat upright, his clear-cut profile 
showing against the vast blue sky. 

“He looks hardly more than just grown 
up, when he talks and laughs like that,” was 
her inward reflection. It seemed as though he 
had dropped the burden that had been so 
heavy all these years, and, in this hour of 
friendliness, had gone back to the boyhood he 
had cast from him. 

He was pointing out to her the wide, dry 
lands of Broken Bow Valley, which, with ir- 
196 


OVER THE PASS 


rigation, were some day to be orchards and 
meadows and rich farming land instead of a 
broad waste, polka-dotted with sage-brush. 
At some length he told of the difficulty in get- 
ting the irrigation project started, of how 
long it had taken to form a company and to 
get construction under way. But of one thing 
he did not speak, of the interruption in the 
work, of the threatened strike and the disap- 
pearance of the company’s funds. Beatrice 
waited, hoping that he would let fall some ex- 
planation, throw some light on that mys- 
tery, and refute forever the dismaying sus- 
picions of Dabney Mills. Of that phase of 
the matter, however, he said no single 
word. 

“When it is all finished and the valley is 
prosperous,” he said, “you must be careful 
when sharp traders try to buy your cabin from 
you, or make bids for your big pines. You 
must not part with them at once.” 

“I think I could never part with them,” she 
197 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


assured him. “I did not know how much I 
could learn to love the woods and the cabin and 
the mountains.” 

He sat for a little while, looking across to 
where the shadows of clouds moved, one by 
one, across the dark slopes of the range op- 
posite. 

“They are friendly things, these mountains,” 
he observed. “They stand by you when you 
are in trouble, somehow, they are so big and 
calm and untroubled themselves.” 

Their friendship and confidence had brought 
them so close together that Beatrice felt sud- 
denly the thrill of a bold impulse. She 
cast aside Dr. Minturn’s advice to let John 
Herrick make the first move toward reconcil- 
iation. It did not occur to her that the man 
beside her might be talking so freely only be- 
cause he meant so soon to close his friendship 
to her forever. She reflected only on how tri- 
umphant she would be when her management 
had brought the whole misunderstanding to a 
198 


OVER THE PASS 


happy end. Yet she did not dare speak out at 
once. 

“Only think,” she began suddenly, “that 
you and I might be lunching at — at the Man- 
hattan together if things had been a little dif- 
ferent.” 

“Yes.” She was greatly encouraged by his 
immediate assent. He looked at his gray flan- 
nel shirt and at her patched riding skirt and 
went on. “We wouldn’t be dressed just as 
we are now, would we? And there would be 
music, instead of the sound of a stream, and 
a hundred voices talking all at once, instead 
of those two magpies chattering in the thicket. 
The fat lady at the next table — there always 
is one — might be wearing a beaver scarf made 
from the jacket of some furry little fellow 
that swam in that very pool below us, and 
the waiter might tell us that there was an un- 
usual delicacy to-day — rainbow trout.” 

She leaned forward, feeling bolder still. 

“You have n’t forgotten,” she said, “and you 
199 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

will be coming back to it all some day. We 
know who you are. We want so much to have 
you belong to us again. Are n’t you coming 
back?” 

“You know?” 

He stood up suddenly and faced her. In 
that instant she knew that she had done wrong. 
The shadow of unforgettable pain swept over 
his face and the laughter died in his eyes. 

“You know?” he repeated. 

She did not trust herself to speak or even to 
look at him. Mutely she nodded keeping her 
wide, unseeing eyes on the fire, clenching her 
hands, holding her breath and waiting. There 
was a long, long pause. 

He moved at last, strode to the fire and trod 
out the flames and the smouldering coals with 
his big boots. 

“It is time we were going on,” he said. 
“You must reach Dr. Minturn’s before dark 
and I have none too much daylight left to 
climb my own trail.” 


200 


OYER THE PASS 

Helplessly she stood watching while he 
caught the horses and saddled them. The 
black one yielded quietly enough, but Buck, 
according to his usual habit, filled the whole 
rock-walled space with his plunging and rear- 
ing, a small but spirited sample of the Wild 
West. He had to yield at last, however and 
was led to where his mistress was waiting. 
John Herrick’s hat was off and his fair hair 
was ruffled by the wind and by his struggles 
with the reluctant pony. Beatrice noticed 
as never before how like he was to Aunt 
Anna. Since she had done so much harm al- 
ready, she felt she might make one more ef- 
fort. 

<f Are n’t you coming back ” she questioned 
desperately. 

“No,” he answered, “I am never coming 
back.” 

He swung into the saddle and, with a great 
rattling of stones dislodged by the pony’s 
hoofs, he was off up the steep trail. It might 
201 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

have been that he looked back, once, to see a 
bright-haired girl hide her face in her arm and 
bow her head against the rock, while a white- 
nosed pony nuzzled her shoulder in vain effort 
to offer comfort. But if John Herrick looked 
back he paid no heed. 


202 


CHAPTER XII 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 

I T was comfort rather than advice that a 
very weary and dispirited Beatrice needed 
when at last she arrived at Dr. Minturn’s 
house. She greeted the rosy, laughing Nancy 
with much enthusiasm, for the sisters had 
missed each other sorely ; but she was impatient 
for the moment when she could talk over their 
whole affair with the kindly doctor. After 
supper, accordingly, he sat, on the grassy bank 
in the moonlight, with a girl on each side of 
him, and listened gravely to all that Beatrice, 
with occasional additions from Nancy, had to 
say. It was not easy for her to confess what 
harm she had done by her impulsive and over 
confident words, but she told her story bravely 
to the end. 


203 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


‘There is no use in the world,” the doctor 
commented cheerfully, “in spending time in 
vain remorse. We should decide what must 
be done now. It may be, the only thing is to 
wait.” 

Beatrice drew a deep quivering sigh. It 
seemed, in the midst of excitement and the 
anxiety to atone, that waiting was the one in- 
tolerable thing. 

“I can’t bear to wait,” she burst out at last. 

“I have never told you,” Dr. Minturn re- 
joined slowly, “of how Miriam and I came to 
live here. We used to be in a big city and we 
had that same full, restless life that most city 
dwellers know. Some people thrive in such 
an atmosphere, some can endure it, but it was 
destruction to us both. I had more patients 
than I could care for, Miriam’s days were 
as crowded as mine. We saw each other little 
and were always tired when our daily duties 
were done. I realized vaguely that such un- 
ceasing toil must kill any man before long, but 
204 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


the excitement of my growing practice was 
something I could not give up. Then Mir- 
iam, one day, asked me some questions; she 
knew some one who had such and such symp- 
tons, who felt this way during the smoky win- 
ter and that way when the air was damp and 
the wind was raw. I was in haste and my 
verdict was quick. ‘Such a person could not 
live a year/ I declared. And then she told me 
the person was herself !” 

He paused to look down at the quiet house 
under the trees, where Miriam’s shadow 
showed on one white curtain after another as 
she went to and fro about her work. For a 
minute he watched as though to assure himself 
that the memory of that terrible day was only 
a dream. 

“It is something we all have to learn; how 
to watch our whole, secure, happy world fall 
to pieces before our eyes, and still keep our 
minds clear and be able to think what to do. 
‘A change of climate/ my fellow-doctors ad- 
205 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


vised; ‘Quiet, rest, no anxiety’; but they all 
shook their heads. We tried place after place, 
it would be too long a story to tell how we 
drifted here at last. The cottage was only 
half its size, then, but it was habitable; the 
place seemed good as any; and neither of us 
had the heart to go farther. The wrench of 
leaving the old life, the weariness of wandering 
from place to place had all done harm; and the 
good effect of the change had not yet come. 
Miriam was always cheerful, always hopeful, 
but I watched her grow thinner and weaker 
every day. I stood by, helpless. There was 
nothing to do but wait, though it seemed that 
waiting must drive me mad.” 

Beatrice nodded under standingly. Waiting 
— how she hated it ! It seemed as though there 
must always be something to do other than to 
wait; but it was likely to be the wrong thing. 

“There was one morning when I had been 
watching beside her bed all night, thinking, as 
she slept, how pinched and thin and shadowy 
206 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 

she had grown. We were young then, if you 
can think of us as that, young like your Aunt 
Anna and John Herrick, with years to dream 
of still before us. And that night it seemed 
as though it all was coming to an end. I 
can remember how the dawn came in at the 
windows and how Miriam opened her eyes to 
look up at me and smile. I believe she was 
thinking that she would rather die here in the 
clean, empty quiet than in that roaring, smoke- 
filled town that we called home. 

“But it was no place of peace for me. I 
called the nurse and flung myself out of the 
house; I tramped away up the mountain, 
crushing the roses and forget-me-nots under 
foot with a savage pleasure that I can still re- 
call. I stood on the highest ridge at last, 
looked out over the valley and the dark hills 
with their summits bathed in sunshine, at the 
winding silver thread of the river, and I held 
up my arms and opened my lips to curse them 
all. 


207 


THE HILL OE ADVENTURE 

“The words I meant to say were never 
spoken. I heard a footstep on the trail be- 
hind me and, as I looked around, a man passed 
by me and went down the mountain. He was 
old, far older than I am now, his face was so 
weather-beaten, his long hair so grizzled, and 
his back so bent that he might have passed for 
Father Time himself. He said no word, but 
he gave me one look that seemed to read every 
thought within me, a glance of complete and 
utter scorn. Some old prospector he was, a 
man who had spent his life trudging over the 
barren hillsides, looking for new mines, disap- 
pointed a thousand times, seeking fortune and 
never finding it. Others who followed him 
had prospered by his discoveries, had found 
the riches that he could not keep ; for the man 
who prospects is seldom the man who gathers 
wealth. He gathers other things, however; 
forbearance, understandings, and a strange, 
deep patience, born of lonely valleys, endless 
trails, and wide starry skies. It was no won- 
208 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


der he scorned me and my pitiful little anger 
with the mountains he called his. 

“I never saw him again. He stepped into 
my life and out of it again, and we did not 
even exchange a word. Yet I have never for- 
gotten the lesson his one look taught me. I 
went down the hill after a little, and the nurse 
met me at the door. 

“ ‘I thought you would never come,’ she said. 
‘I have been thinking for days that there was a 
little change, and now I am sure of it.’ 

“Yes, the broad daylight showed it: the 
flame of Miriam’s life was burning a little 
brighter; the mountain air was beginning to 
do its work at last. In a week she could sit 
up ; in a month she could walk about ; and in a 
year she was well.” 

“And you never went home again?” Nancy 
asked, when a pause marked the end of his 
tale. 

“Home was here now, and we had no wish 
to go back to a life that had so nearly been the 
209 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


end of both of us. For a time there was no 
doctor in the valley below us here, so I used 
to do what I could for the sick people in these 
mountains. My place at home was soon filled ; 
the tasks I had left went on without me. By 
and by a younger man moved into this valley 
to take the work, so that I was free to try that 
experiment that I had long thought of — what 
Miriam calls my Christmas-tree Garden. I 
have helped again when there were epidemics 
in the valley and when our doctor went to war ; 
but I am always glad to lay the burden down 
and come back to my trees. And the point 
of all my long story is, my dear, that some 
time in the course of our growing up, we must 
learn how to wait. To be eager and ardent is 
part of being young, but to learn that eager- 
ness does not bring all things is a truth that 
the years bring us.” 

He made a gesture toward the summit of 
Gray Cloud Mountain, a black mass against 
the twinkling stars. 


210 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


“He is learning his lesson, too, that boy up 
there, camping in the dark and the silence, 
thinking it all out, coming nearer and nearer 
to the truth of things at last.” 

“Do you — oh, do you think that he might 
change and come back to us in the end?” cried 
Beatrice in eager hope. 

“I believe so. And when the time comes to 
act, you will know what to do.” 

A very sleepy and comforted girl was tucked 
into bed by the doctor’s wife — a young person 
who thought she could not sleep on account of 
her many anxieties, but who was lost in slum- 
ber almost before the door was closed. She 
did not even hear the storm of wind and rain 
that swept over the cottage in the night, but 
awoke in the morning to see the sun shining, 
and to hear a camp-robber jay calling so loudly 
from the nearest tree that she could sleep no 
longer. 

“Your horse is not fit to go back for a day 
or two,” Dr. Minturn said at breakfast. “You 

211 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


pushed him too hard when you climbed the 
pass, and you should leave him here to rest. I 
will lend you my brown Presto. He is not 
such a pony as Buck, I admit, but he will carry 
you safely enough. You can come back for 
your horse later, or I will send him over the 
range as soon as some one passes.” 

The sun was high when she and Nancy set 
out together, shining above the pass as they 
mounted upward. 

4 ‘But there is something the matter with it,” 
Beatrice declared to her sister; “there does n’t 
seem to be any warmth in it, somehow.” And 
she shivered a little. 

An unusual haze seemed to hang like a blan- 
ket between them and the sun, and the air held 
a strange chill. Even when wrapped in their 
warm coats, the two girls felt cold as they 
climbed to the summit of the pass and began 
the descent on the other side. Beatrice said 
very little, so busy was her mind with many 
212 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


difficult problems. Must she tell Aunt Anna 
what had happened, and let her know that all 
hopes of meeting her brother were at an end? 
Would John Herrick’s house soon he closed, 
and would Hester have to leave them too? 

Would it he of any use — Good heavens! 
what was that lying beside the trail? Some- 
thing huge, dark, and unwieldy was stretched 
out among the bushes: it was a black horse, ap- 
parently dead. They both knew those white 
feet and the brand on the flank. It was John 
Herrick’s black mare, Dolly. 

They dismounted, while the poor creature 
opened its eyes and managed to raise its head. 
A horse that is so injured that it cannot get 
up when a person comes near is sorely hurt 
indeed. That much Beatrice knew, yet was 
powerless to discover what was the matter. 
By some intuition Nancy guessed one thing, 
at least, that was needed, for she ran to the 
stream, filled her felt hat with water, and 
21 B 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


brought it back, spilling and dripping, but with 
enough left for the poor animal to drink grate- 
fully. 

“I wish you could speak,” Beatrice said 
helplessly, as the mare laid her head down 
again. Presto nudged her inquiringly with 
his nose, but she did not move. 

They observed as they stood looking at her, 
that the bridle was half torn off — that the 
big saddle, with broken cantle, was twisted all 
to one side by the pony’s fall. On the face of 
the mountain wall above them they could trace 
Dolly’s disastrous course in trampled bushes, 
weeds torn up by the roots, gouges in the rocky 
soil where she had slid and rolled and strug- 
gled to regain her footing. But look where 
they might, they could see no sign of John 
Herrick. 

“When the time comes to act, you will know 
what to do.” 

So Dr. Minturn had said, and he had been 
right. Beatrice knew well that now was the 
214 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


moment for action, not waiting; and she felt 
her mind surprisingly calm and cool. They 
must follow the spidery line of trail that zig- 
zagged back and forth over the precipitous 
mountain-side, and find the spot, high above, 
from which the black mare had fallen. 

“You wait here, Nancy,” she ordered, but 
she heard the other horse’s hoofs pattering be- 
hind her even as she turned. It was useless 
to try to make Nancy stay behind. What was 
it Hester had said that way was called — that 
tiny path that crawled out upon the smooth 
face of the rock wall? It was Dead Man’s 
Mile. 

There were moments when the brown pony 
slipped, moments when the vast depths below 
made both the girls so giddy that they were 
forced to shut their eyes. A big stone rolled 
under Presto’s foot and he drew back only just 
in time to keep from plunging after it. Bea- 
trice tried not to watch it, but she could not 
keep her eyes away as it slid and bounded in 
215 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

longer and longer leaps until finally it disap- 
peared into the woods below. 

“Are you safe, Nancy?” she called. She 
did not dare look back. 

“Yes,” came the reply, rather unsteadily, 
from Nancy close behind. 

Up and up they went. It seemed as though 
they would remember for all their lives every 
treacherous inch of that trail along which they 
crawled as a fly crawls crookedly up a window- 
pane, and yet that they would never be able to 
find their way down again. Up and up — and 
there suddenly was John Herrick, lying on a 
narrow shelf of rock just below them, his white 
face turned upward to the sky, and the stones 
and tufts of grass about him stained with blood. 
Just ahead, at the turn of the trail, they could 
see his little tent, his various belongings heaped 
together, and the aimless, drifting smoke of 
his still smoldering camp fire. 

Before Nancy could even cry out, Beatrice 
was down from her horse, down from the trail, 
216 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 

and was kneeling beside him. A gash across 
the forehead was his most evident injury, but 
that could not account for all this blood. No, 
here on the under side of his arm, where the 
sleeve of his coat was torn away, this was the 
deeper wound from which had poured forth 
that crimson deluge that had soaked his clothes 
and stained the ground under him. Thanks to 
instructions that she had received long before, 
she knew what to do. But could she be quick 
enough? Might she not be too late? As she 
twisted her handkerchief, she tried to remember 
just what she had been told, where the knot 
was to come, just which spot was the proper 
one for the pressure. 

Those first-aid lectures — it was only because 
every one else was going to them that she had 
attended at all. And she was rather bored by 
the time she had reached the third one, and 
prone to let her mind wander. With madden- 
ing clearness, she could recollect how she had 
looked out of the window, glanced at one girl’s 
217 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


hair-ribbon, decided she would have a dress 
like the one in front of her, and with only 
half her mind had listened to what the lecturer 
was saying. And now John Herrick’s chance 
of life was hanging on her memory! Nancy 
was standing beside her, helpless, horrified, un- 
able to be of use until Beatrice should tell 
her how. She remembered now : she had found 
the artery where the pulse still beat feebly; she 
had arranged the pad to press against the 
bone; she was telling Nancy how to help her 
twist the bandage tight. 

Slowly the trickle of blood lessened, came 
forth, at last, one drop at a time, and finally 
ceased altogether. It seemed a long, long wait 
before John Herrick opened his eyes. 

“Was Dolly killed?” he asked first, and then, 
after a while, “How do you come to be here? 
Surely you never climbed that trail, you girls, 
alone?” 

It was a grisly nightmare, their attempt to 
get him up to the level bench of ground where 
218 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 

he had pitched his camp, but they managed it at 
last. One effort they made to lift him into 
Presto’s saddle, but it was attended with so 
little success and such evident agony, that they 
gave it up. 

“ There ’s something broken — besides the 
cuts in my arm,” John Herrick muttered, and 
lapsed into unconsciousness as they managed 
to drag him under the shelter of his tent. 
They propped up his injured arm on a roll of 
blankets, replenished the fire, and sat down on 
each side of him to wait until he should rouse 
himself again. 

Although it was high noon the sky was 
strangely dark, and even under the sheltering 
wall of the tent the air was growing very cold. 
Heavy masses of cloud were sailing across 
the overcast sky, and the mountains were tak- 
ing on a strange, somber color that was so un- 
familiar as to be terrifying. 

Looking down, they saw that John Herrick 
had opened his eyes again and was staring up 
219 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


at them without moving. In answer to the 
unspoken question in Beatrice’s eyes, he began 
to explain very slowly, with long pauses for 
rest. 

<£ I fell, very early in the morning, before 
the dawn, just as the storm was going by. 
I was riding recklessly in the dark. Poor 
Dolly knew we were in danger and hung back, 
but I urged her on. She slipped and I was 
flung clear, but I could not move. I could 
hear her scrambling and rolling and falling 
farther and farther below me, but I could not 
even turn my head. You say she was really 
still alive?” 

He was quiet for a long time after this ef- 
fort, but at last spoke again. 

“You have made me very comfortable,” he 
said. “You have done everything possible. 
Now it is time for you to go.” 

“Go?” echoed Nancy. “Why must we go?” 

His eyes were looking beyond her at the 
threatening sky, and that ominous, deeping 
220 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


color of the range opposite. Only one peak, 
the highest, stood shining above the others, still 
bathed in fitful sunshine ; but in a moment the 
enveloping shadow had crawled up the slope 
and quenched its brilliance at last. 

J ohn Herrick spoke again, more insistently. 

“At the very best it makes me shudder to 
have you two go down that trail alone, and 
you must do it while the light is good and there 
is nothing to hurry you.” He struggled to 
raise himself on his elbow and added sharply, 
“You are not to delay. You can send some 
one back to find me.” 

Nancy got up obediently and went to stand 
before the tent. The two horses were linger- 
ing near the fire : she caught their bridles and 
waited. It was her elder sister who must de- 
cide what they were to do. 

A long bank of cloud, seething, boiling, dark 
below but white at its upper edge, like surf 
breaking on a reef, was rolling over the sum- 
mit of the rugged height opposite. The slow 
221 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


roar of the rising wind could be heard stirring 
the tree-tops in the forest below. Seeing Bea- 
trice hesitate at the door of the tent, John Her- 
rick broke forth with the desperate truth. 

“There is snow coming. An hour of it 
will make the trail impassable for you. It 
will be cold as midwinter before night, and 
dark long before then. There is not a minute 
for you to lose. Beatrice, my dear, my dear, 
what does anything matter if harm comes to 
you and your sister? Go! Go!” 

A breath of wind touched Beatrice for a 
second and was gone, yet its icy chill cut her 
to the very bone. Through the comparative 
warmth of the air about them it had appeared 
and vanished like the dread ghost of that bitter 
cold, reigning up yonder where the snows never 
melted and the ice-fields clung to the moun- 
tain-side the whole year through. Nancy shiv- 
ered, and the brown horse, trembling too, 
shouldered close to her. But Beatrice, in the 
door of the tent, turned suddenly to regard 
222 


DEAD MAN’S MILE 


John Herrick with steady eyes, with a look as 
fixed and determined as his very own. 

“We are not going to leave you,” she said. 


223 


CHAPTER XIII 


“old friends and old times” 
RIDERLESS brown pony, very cauti- 



ous and very wise, stepping carefully 
from ledge to ledge, testing his footing and 
picking his way with the greatest of skill, was 
the messenger upon whom depended all hope 
of safety for Beatrice, Nancy, and John Her- 
rick. Tucked under his stirrup leather was a 
note that Beatrice had scrawled hastily on the 
scrap of paper that had wrapped their sand- 
wiches. It was addressed to Dr. Minturn and 
told where they were and how desperate was 
their need. She had knotted the bridle reins 
on Presto’s neck, turned up the stirrups over 
the saddle, given him a slap on the flank and 
told him to “go home.” Every well-trained 
Western horse knows that order, and will find 


224 ? 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 

his way over the steepest trails back to his own 
stable, nor will he allow himself to be stopped 
or molested on the way. 

“It is lucky we had Presto,” Beatrice said to 
her sister. “Buck or your horse would have 
taken twice as long to get home, and Hester 
and Aunt Anna would be so frightened, though 
Olaf would have known what to do. As it is, 
they won’t worry, for I said I might stay an- 
other day. I wonder how soon help can 
come.” 

John Herrick, lying very still among the 
blankets, made no comment. They began to 
realize that he had summoned all his strength 
to pretend he was not much hurt and to per- 
suade them to leave him. It was plain that 
he was suffering intensely, and was resting be- 
fore trying to go on with what he had to say. 

“Unsaddle Nancy’s pony,” he directed at 
last, “and turn him loose. Without his sad- 
dle he will know he is turned out to graze and 
will not go home. He will drift down the 
225 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


mountain and find shelter somewhere in the 
timber, for he could not go through the storm 
here on the hill.” 

The sides of the tent flapped and quivered 
in the eddies of the wind as the gale began to 
blow heavier. Under John Herrick’s direc- 
tion, they rolled stones on the edge of the can- 
vas to keep the blast from creeping under it, 
and laid larger logs of wood at the back of 
the fire to make a slower, steadier blaze. 

The smoke of the fire, with most of its heat 
also, was tossed and whirled out into the void, 
but they were able finally to hang up a spare 
tarpaulin to reflect the warmth into the tent. 
The site of the camp had been chosen wisely, 
being sheltered by a high shoulder of rock, 
with a nook between two stones to hold the fire, 
and a small stream pouring over a cliff near 
by. Yet, even in this corner, there was not 
complete protection from the roaring blast 
that was beginning to carry the first flakes of 
snow. More than once Beatrice saw the in- 
226 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 


jured man’s eyes turn anxiously toward the 
pile of fuel, gathered in abundance for ordi- 
nary purposes, but pitifully small for the need 
that had arisen now. She knew that he would 
not tell them of the necessity for gathering 
more, since to seek fire-wood on that wind- 
swept mountain was a dangerous and difficult 
task. 

“Go into the tent and talk to him, Nancy. 
Keep him looking another way,” she whispered 
as she fed the blaze. “I am going down the 
trail a little way to cut some brush.” 

Taking up the small ax from where he had 
left it beside the fire and turning her coat col- 
lar up to her ears, she slipped away before 
her sister could protest. 

The wind whipped about her the moment 
she passed beyond the sheltering rock, buffet- 
ing and blinding her until she thought she 
would be flung from the ledge. She had never 
felt such piercing cold. It cut through her 
coat and made her fingers and feet ache in a 
227 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


moment. Valiantly she struggled forward, 
getting her bearings gradually and peering 
this way and that through the driving snow 
to find the fuel that was so desperately needed. 
Among the tufts of scrubby bushes that clung 
here and there to the stony slope, it was diffi- 
cult to discover anything dry enough to burn. 
Nor was it easy to cut through the tough, fib- 
rous stems that had clung to the mountain in 
defiance of so many storms. As she became 
more used to her task, however, she began to 
see more and more what she could use; the 
brisk exercise warmed her, and the armfuls of 
brush that she carried back and heaped up by 
the tent began to grow encouragingly high. 

“Don’t go again,” Nancy begged at last. 
“It is getting dark, and you are going farther 
and farther away. I know you should not try 
it any more.” 

“Only one more trip,” Beatrice returned 
blithely. “I won’t leave this upper stretch of 
trail, and that is safe enough.” 

228 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 

She was beginning to enjoy her task, to feel 
a glowing defiance of the wind that pushed and 
swayed her; and she was conscious of a warm- 
ing pride in that heap of fuel that meant com- 
fort, even life, to the three of them. This 
time she went farther afield than before, be- 
yond where she had found John Herrick, along 
the ledge to a spur of rock where she had 
guessed a good growth of underbrush might 
be found in the sheltered hollow. She found 
that her surmise was correct and harvested a 
generous fagot of dry brush and some heavier 
branches. Then she scrambled further along 
the slope, where a dry, stunted little tree held 
up its dead and twisted arms against the sky. 

“Its trunk will burn famously,” she told her- 
self, perhaps to quiet any misgivings she felt 
concerning the treacherous ground over which 
she must pass. Bracing herself, she swung the 
short -handled ax and cut deep into the wood. 
Once she struck, and again, then heard the pre- 
liminary crack that signaled the surrender of 
229 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the tough old tree. She leaned forward for 
the last blow — and felt the ground crumble un- 
der foot so that she lost her balance and fell. 
Over and over she rolled, down a long slope 
of sharp stones that cut her hands and bruised 
her face, offering no support as, with out- 
stretched hands, she snatched at any hold that 
would stop her fall. 

A little juniper bush, whose branch caught 
her dress and to whose roots she clung with 
bleeding, frantic hands, held her at last. Be- 
yond, in a great well of shadows, she could 
peer down and down, but could see nothing be- 
neath her, could only hear the tinkle of the ax 
as it struck a stone far below. She shuddered 
as she looked into that dusky emptiness, then 
resolutely turned away and clambered up the 
slope. 

“Though how I managed it,” she confessed 
to Nancy some time afterward, “I simply 
couldn’t tell you. When I rolled down the 
hill, my heart seemed to be rolling over and 
230 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 


over, too, inside me, and it was still doing it 
all the time I was crawling up again. The 
stones slipped under my feet, and every bush 
I took hold of seemed to give way in my hand. 
It was only because I had to get back to you 
that I ever scrambled up again.” 

Yet when she reached the steadier footing 
of the trail, she saw the dead tree that had been 
the cause of her undoing, and setting her 
teeth, climbed out once more, inch by inch, 
gave the half-severed trunk a jerk, and 
brought it away in triumph. She had almost 
more than she could carry, and her heart was 
beating fast as she struggled up the path once 
more, warm, excited, and happy. 

“I thought you were never coming back,” 
said Nancy anxiously. She was kneeling by 
the fire, stirring something in a tin cup. 

“I — I went further than I intended,” Bea- 
trice answered and, for the moment, offered 
no more extensive report of her adventure. 
When she went into the tent, however John 
231 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


Herrick opened his eyes to look at her with 
troubled questioning. 

“ Where have you been so long?” he asked. 
“Nancy would not tell me, so I know it was 
something unsafe.” 

“I was just cutting some brush for the 
fire,” she returned cheerfully. “I took your 
ax and I — I didn’t bring it back with me.” 

His observant blue eyes went over her from 
head to foot, and his face, drawn with pain 
though it was, wrinkled to a smile. He did 
not overlook, as Nancy had done, her damaged 
skirt and her bleeding knuckles. When he 
spoke it was so low that she had to stoop down 
to hear. 

“Have I not enough to blame myself for, 
without having to see some terrible thing hap- 
pen to you here on this cruel mountain? I 
am proud that you belong to me, you and that 
blessed, warm-hearted Nancy. Can you ever 
forgive me?” 


232 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 


“Forgive you for what?” she asked protest- 
ingly. 

“For all that I have done.” 

Nancy came in at this moment, carrying 
something very carefully. 

“Christina told me that when people camp 
in the snow,” she said, “they warm their beds 
with hot stones, so I have raked some out of 
the fire, nice, flat ones, piping hot.” 

She packed them in among the blankets with 
the deftness of a trained nurse, for Nancy was 
possessed, by nature, of a comforting touch. 

“I am better now,” he declared, trying to 
smile reassuringly upon them both, although 
the color of his face, ghastly white under the 
sunburn, belied his words. “I want you to 
sit down and tell me — ” his voice faltered, but 
in a moment he went on again — ” and tell me 
about Anna. Is she getting well? How long 
has she been ill? Did she really come here to 


233 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


His voice trailed away to a gasping whis- 
per, but Beatrice knew what he wished to ask. 

“She came to find you,” she answered. 
“You shall hear all about it. No, don’t move; 
it will make your arm begin to bleed again. 
Lie still and we will tell you everything.” 

With the wind howling over their heads, 
but with the slow heat of the fire keeping the 
worst of the cold at bay, they sat there by him 
and told the whole of their tale. Sometimes 
one of them would get up to throw some more 
fuel upon the flame and the other would take 
up the story in the interval. Now and then 
he would ask a half -audible question, but 
mostly he lay quite quiet, his steady eyes — 
how like they were to Aunt Anna’s! — fixed 
upon the face of the girl who was speaking. 
When the account was finished, he had various 
things to ask, often with long pauses for rest 
between the words. 

“Do you live in the same house — it was the 
one where your father and Anna and I were 
234 * 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 


born? Does Bridget Flynn still stay with 
you? Which of you sleeps in the blue room 
where on stormy nights you can hear the rain 
in the big chimney ?” 

Yes, they lived in the house he knew. Brid- 
get Flynn, the old nurse who had cared for 
them all, was not with them but was stiU alive. 
Beatrice had the big south room — it was green 
now, — but the rain in the chimney was just the 
same. 

“How it does come back!” he said at last 
with a sigh; “and to think that I have been 
such a fool as to believe that I could put all 
that I loved so much behind me.” 

His voice failed after that and his questions 
ceased. They could hear his faint breathing 
and feel the thin, uneven pulse in his wrist, but 
he did not move or give other sign of life. The 
night had closed about them, the storm was 
still blowing louder, and the cold growing 
more intense. Snow was piling about the 
tent, eddying through the opening, lying in 
235 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


white drifts even among the folds of the 
blankets. 

They crept back to the fire at last, both of 
them wondering miserably at the heaviness of 
his stupor, but trying to assure themselves that 
it was really sleep. Very closely they huddled 
together, sharing the single blanket that was 
wrapped about them, saying very little but 
thinking very much. 

“Aunt Anna will be going to bed now,” 
Nancy observed, after such long quiet that 
Beatrice had thought she was nodding. 
“Christina will be lighting the lamps and tuck- 
ing in the fur rugs on the sleeping-porch.” 

Since Beatrice scarcely answered, but sat 
staring, though with unseeing eyes, at the red 
coals, Nancy spoke again. 

“Are you cold, Beatrice? Are you afraid? 
How soon do you think help will come?” 

“It will come soon,” her sister answered con- 
fidently. “No, I am not cold, and I am not 
afraid.” 


236 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 

Nancy, willing to be reassured, crept closer 
and allowed her heavy eyelids, weighed down 
by drowsiness, to fall lower and lower. Bea- 
trice, however, sat erect and wide awake. She 
was counting the number of hours before Dr. 
Minturn could get her message, calculating the 
time their fuel would last. By midnight the 
final log would be burned, the last bundle of 
brush would have gone up in windswept 
sparks. And what was to come when the fire 
was dead? 

She felt strangely quiet in spite of all the 
dread possibilities before her. She thought 
over, one by one, all the events in that long, 
twisted chain of circumstances that had 
brought her here, and realized all that she had 
learned, how much she had changed. Could 
it be possible that she had once been so ab- 
sorbed in her own affairs, in the pleasures and 
interests of her single, restricted circle, as to 
have been blind to her father’s anxiety and to 
Aunt Anna’s slowly breaking heart? She had 
237 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


left behind, also, that restless discontent and 
nameless dissatisfaction that used suddenly to 
spring up in the midst of the careless happi- 
ness of the old life. Even when they first 
came to live in the cabin she had been filled 
with anxiety and the weight of unfamiliar re- 
sponsibility, but such misgivings had disap- 
peared also, blown completely away into the 
past by the winds of Gray Cloud Mountain. 
Here she had learned new things, had felt new 
strength, had begun to play a part in the real 
affairs of life. 

Nancy, leaning against her, had dropped 
sound asleep and Beatrice herself dozed at 
last. Her last clear thought had been of Dab- 
ney Mills. Even the puzzle of his suspicions 
would be solved, she felt sure. But why had 
he thought ? 

Her eyes closed and opened again with a 
start upon a different world. She could not 
tell how long a time had passed. The storm 
was over, the moon was up and the whole 
238 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 


mountain-side was bathed in light. Leaning 
forward, she attempted to look down into the 
valley and was surprised to see no valley there. 
A level floor of clouds, as smooth as the sur- 
face of a lake, but of a strange, shadowy white- 
ness that no water could ever show, lay below 
her, a flood of mist that filled Broken Bow 
Valley to the brim. Fascinated, she sat 
watching, while the moonlight grew clearer 
and the soft white turned to glistening silver. 
Although she thought herself awake, she dozed 
again, for she had a dim idea that she could 
walk forth on the smooth level of that white 
floor, past the mountain tops, straight away to- 
ward the moon, while all the time another self 
sat cold and nodding by the fire, feeding the 
failing flame mechanically, with one arm 
around the slumbering Nancy. Vaguely she 
knew that complete oblivion would mean the 
end of the fire, the quenching of the warmth 
that kept them alive and of the light that was 
to be a signal to their rescuers. 

239 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

How she longed to lay down her head and 
give herself up to slumber! How far away 
her dream was carrying her, out across that 
white sea whose further edge seemed to roll 
across the peaks and break against the stars! 
Some inward spirit kept her faithful to her 
task, even after real consciousness had van- 
ished. When she did give up to heavy slum- 
ber it was only when her work was done, when 
her drowsy ears heard afar the chink of iron 
hoofs upon the trail, heard the scrambling of 
feet and the sound of men’s voices coming 
nearer. 

“They are coming; they see us,” she thought, 
and her head dropped upon her arm in abso- 
lute exhaustion. 

It must have been only for a moment that 
she slept, although it seemed that hours must 
have passed when she awoke with a jump to a 
bewildered confusion of sights and sounds. 
The red light of a lantern was flashing in her 
face, the huge, grotesque shadow of a horse’s 
240 


“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES” 


head danced back and forth on the rock wall 
beside her, and Dr. Minturn’s voice sounded 
in her ear. 

“Beatrice, are you safe? Are you alive?” 

Dazzled and confused, she rubbed her eyes, 
then motioned toward the tent where John 
Herrick lay, since words of explanation would 
not come quickly enough. She held her 
breath, so it seemed to her, through all the 
minutes that the doctor was bending to ex- 
amine the unconscious man. When he 
straightened up again to speak to her, how 
comforting it was to hear that big voice boom- 
ing out where the last sound had been John 
Herrick’s failing whisper! 

“He has gone a long way,” the old doctor 
said, “but please heaven, we ’ll bring him back 
again.” 


24*1 


CHAPTER XIV 


HASTY WORDS 

I N the gray light that is the ghost of morn- 
ing, a fantastic procession went slowly 
down the headlong slope of Dead Man’s Mile. 
The tall doctor strode ahead with his swinging 
lantern, and behind him came the two men he 
had brought, carrying John Herrick between 
them upon a litter of blankets. Nancy, follow- 
ing them clung fast to her pommel and was 
glad the saddle was so deep that she could not 
well fall out of it, no matter how much the doc- 
tor’s pony, upon which she was mounted, 
swayed and slid down the path. For guid- 
ance, he was left almost as much to himself as 
was the extra horse following at the end of the 
line, whose nose was so close to the tail of the 
pony that Beatrice rode, and whose footsteps 
242 


HASTY WORDS 


were guided by the second lantern that bobbed 
and jerked from her saddle-bow. 

“It was the next thing to impossible to climb 
up in bright daylight,” Beatrice thought. 
“How can we ever go down in the dark, with 
a helpless person to carry?” 

But the doctor had declared that further 
delay meant too much danger to John Her- 
rick, and that the attempt must be made. 
Down they went, past the rocky shelf where 
the girls had found him, past the dizzy preci- 
pice where Beatrice had dropped the ax and 
had so nearly followed it, over barriers that 
looked impassable, down steep declivities that 
were nothing but wells of blackness and hidden 
danger. A word of direction from the doctor, 
a breathless squeak from Nancy once when 
her horse lurched suddenly beneath her, the 
steady scuffle of the ponies’ feet — those were 
the only sounds. They had passed the icy 
shallows of the tumbling stream, they had 
looped over the jutting shoulder of smooth 
243 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

rock where there was scarcely a foothold : there 
was a long, stiff -legged jump for each pony, 
and they were down. 

Through the rustling underbrush of the 
lower slope, the main trail leading downward 
from Gray Cloud Pass was firm under their 
feet. 

“Looks like Broadway, don’t it, after that 
squirrel track back yonder?” observed one of 
the men, as they stopped to rest for a little. 
The other man went to catch Nancy’s pony 
which had been turned loose before the storm 
and which now came, stamping and snorting, 
through the dark, drawn by the lantern light 
and by the desire for company of its own kind. 

It was possible to carry the litter between 
two horses now, so that the doctor mounted, 
left one man to follow on foot, and ordered 
them all to press forward. A moving shadow 
in the darkness proved to be John Herrick’s 
black mare, who had managed to scramble 
244 


HASTY WORDS 


to her feet and stood, with head drooping and 
one leg helpless, beside the path. 

“We can’t stop for her now,” the doctor 
said. “I will send some one back to see if 
there is anything to be done.” 

The poor creature was left behind, although 
Beatrice leaned from her saddle to touch the 
soft anxious nose that was thrust out to her, 
and although a pleading whinny could be 
heard long after the darkness had swallowed 
up the suffering pony. 

They went on steadily and quickly now, 
with Beatrice nodding in her saddle from un- 
believable weariness. They were fording a 
stream; they were threading the grove of 
aspen-trees ; they had reached the last mile of 
their journey. The whispering leaves were 
all speaking together in the morning breeze; 
the birds were beginning to sing; the darkness 
had faded so that the light of Beatrice’s lan- 
tern had shrunk to the pale ghost of a flame. 

245 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


She looked back to see the bare granite slope 
above her turn from gray to rose, and to see 
the stark summit of Gray Cloud Mountain 
shine in sudden silver radiance as the sunrise 
touched it. 

Almost immediately she saw the men ahead 
of her stop, dismount, and lean over the litter. 

“He is awake, and I think he wants you,” 
one of them said to Nancy, but she listened 
and shook her head. 

“He is not really conscious,” she answered, 
“and it is my Aunt Anna that he is asking 
for.” 

It was a week, a dragging, interminable 
week, before any one was able to know just 
what were to be the results of that fateful ex- 
pedition up the slopes of Gray Cloud Moun- 
tain. Nancy, stiff and aching in every muscle 
from so much unwonted riding, was the first to 
recover and to set about her housekeeping. 
Beatrice had sprained her knee in that peri- 
lous moment when she dropped the ax over 
246 


HASTY WORDS 


the mountain-side, but she had scarcely noticed 
the mishap until, slipping from the saddle at 
her own door, she found herself unable to 
walk into the house. For three days she was 
almost helpless; by the end of seven, however, 
she was able to get about and help Nancy and 
Christina with their work. 

Christina had come to stay at the cabin so 
that the girls might not be alone, for Aunt 
Anna had moved to John Herrick’s house. 
It seemed at first that she had found her 
brother only in time to part with him again, 
for through four terrible days he lay so ill 
that not even Dr. Minturn could have much 
hope. Perhaps no one knew until that dread- 
ful time how brave Aunt Anna could be. It 
was she who was cheerful; it was she who was 
hopeful and kept up the courage of the others; 
it was her tired, white, but smiling face upon 
which John Herrick’s eyes first fell when he 
opened them to consciousness again. 

The three girls were standing in the door 
247 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


and Dr. Minturn was with them, but it was 
only his sister that John Herrick saw. 

“Anna,” he said, “I have had a bad dream, 
I think.” 

“Yes,” she nodded gravely. “We have all 
been dreaming, but at last we are all awake.” 

His eyes went to the window where, in the 
hot sun of brilliant noonday, the moving tree- 
tops showed their densest green and the far 
mountains stood blue against a bluer sky. 
He looked doubtful for a moment, as though 
he had expected to find himself in his old home, 
in that room where the rain in the chimney had 
lulled him to sleep through childhood nights. 
When he remembered all that had happened 
since, would he shrink away again into that iso- 
lation he had made for himself? They could 
actually see, from the changes in his face, just 
how the flood of memories rose and swept over 
him, recalling everything, from his accident on 
the hill back to that day when he had vowed 
to shut the door of home behind him forever. 

24*8 


HASTY WORDS 


At last he turned to his sister again and smiled. 

“I thought I could never forgive all of 
you,” he said, “and it was you, this whole long 
time, who should have forgiven me. Through 
all these years I have been remembering how 
I went away, how I looked into that row of 
serious faces, and thought I read doubt in 
every one of them. Yes, Anna dear, I know 
you believed in me still; I know you called 
after me ; but I vowed it was too late. I heard 
your voice as I closed the door: it has followed 
me ever since, but I would not listen. Can 
you forgive me?” 

The girls slipped away and Dr. Minturn 
closed the door. 

“He ’ll do,” he said gruffly. “He won’t 
need any of us to cure him now.” 

A man who has spent the last ten years in 
the free open and the bracing air of the Rocky 
Mountains does not linger long upon a sick 
bed when once he has begun to recover. John 
Herrick was sitting up in a week’s time and 
249 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


was able to limp about the house at the end 
of ten days. As his strength grew, so did 
Aunt Anna’s, so that step by step they came 
along the road of health together. 

“Is n’t she wearing herself out nursing 
him?” Beatrice asked Dr. Minturn anxiously, 
but he only laughed. 

“It never harms people to do what they like 
most in the world,” he answered. “I can 
hardly tell which of the two is getting well the 
faster. They have no further need for me, 
so I will be getting back to Miriam. I can 
leave the whole affair in your capable hands, 
Miss Beatrice.” 

Beatrice laughed, yet flushed with pleasure 
that the doctor should voice such confidence 
in her. She could not help feeling a little 
thrill of pride when she thought how well 
things were turning out. Even the black mare 
was hobbling about the corral, giving promise 
that she could be ridden almost as soon as 
John Herrick would be able to mount her. 

250 


HASTY WORDS 


There was still the affair in the village to be 
made clear, but of that Beatrice had thought 
very little lately, and not at all of Dabney 
Mills. 

A growing restlessness on Christina’s part 
was the first reminder of what was going on 
about them. 

“I don’t want to go,” she explained when, 
on Aunt Anna’s returning to the cabin, 
Christina announced that she was needed at 
home; “but I am anxious when I am away 
from Thorvik. I never know what new things 
he is thinking up.” 

She had waited to wash the evening dishes, 
lingering over them as though she were un- 
willing to finish, but she had said a reluctant 
good-by at last and had gone away down the 
hill. Beatrice sat on the doorstep looking 
after her, and lingered long after she was gone, 
watching the darkness deepen between the 
tree trunks, and the fireflies moving to and fro. 
It had been an over-busy day with the result 
251 


THE HILL OE ADVENTURE 


that she was very tired. It was surely the 
worst possible moment that Dabney Mills 
could have chosen to come striding through 
the dark, whistling with irritating shrillness. 

“There are all sorts of rumors about John 
Herrick’s being hurt,” he began at once, “so 
I came up to see if I could get the real facts. 
I tried to interview the old doctor when he 
was down in the village, but I did n’t have 
much satisfaction. Now, you will have no ob- 
jection to telling me a few things, I feel sure.” 

On that very spot, Beatrice thought, he had 
been told once, twice, it was difficult to say 
how many times, that his presence was un- 
welcome and that he would be told nothing. 
Yet here he was again, as inquisitive and as 
well-assured of success as ever. 

“I don’t see why you keep coming and ask- 
ing things,” she said irritably, “when we never 
tell you anything.” 

“A fellow can never tell,” he replied easily, 
“where he can pick up a few facts, even in the 
252 


HASTY WORDS 


most unlikely places. I won’t say this is a 
very hopeful one, but there ’s nowhere else to 
go. I hear your aunt has been nursing Her- 
rick. Now I could make something very in- 
teresting out of that.” 

His insinuating grin, half visible in the 
dark, was quite beyond bearing. 

“Why should n’t she be nursing him when 
she is his own sister?” she cried hotly, a sudden 
burst of temper driving her quite beyond the 
bounds of prudence. 

Dabney’s mouth opened to speak, but no 
words came — only at last a long whistle of 
astonishment. 

“Sister!” he ejaculated; then repeated it to 
himself, “Sister!” 

Beatrice said nothing, for she began to have 
an uneasy feeling that harm might come from 
her hasty speech. 

“But look-a-here,” Dabney Mills burst out, 
“if she ’s his sister and he ’s your uncle, why 
did you never let on to any one? You were 
253 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


strangers to him, you two girls, when you came 
here: I could swear it. And one day whe i 
you were out, I asked your aunt if she ha;l 
ever seen John Herrick, and she said no.” 

Still Beatrice was silent, with growing mis- 
givings, as he went on excitedly, as much to 
himself as to her. 

“There must have been a family quarrel,” 
he speculated shrewdly. “Herrick did some- 
thing disgraceful, most likely, back there at 
home, and came West to lose himself, and the 
rest of you followed, by and by, to see him; 
but you never owned he belonged to you. 
Say, that ’s something to tell them down yon- 
der at the meeting to-night. When they hear 
that about his past, they may know for sure 
where to look for their money.” 

He swung on his heel and was off in haste 
down the hill. 

“Stop! Stop!” cried Beatrice, but he paid 
no heed. She ran a few steps after him but 
he had already disappeared. 

254 


HASTY WORDS 


As she went into the house, she was thinking 
of that boulder that had rolled from under 
her horse’s feet on the climb up Dead Man’s 
Mile. She remembered how it bounded down 
the slope, disappearing in the wood to do what 
damage she could not tell. In much the same 
way her thoughtless speech had escaped from 
her and now, quite beyond her reach, was 
doing harm at which she could only guess. 

They all retired early that night, for Aunt 
Anna, who had just come home, was tired as 
well as happy, and Nancy had been so busy 
that she could not hold her eyes open even 
until a decent hour for bedtime. In spite of 
her uneasy thoughts, Beatrice fell asleep 
quickly, and, even after an hour of sound slum- 
ber, awoke with difficulty. 

“It is raining,” she thought sleepily at first, 
hearing a light tap, tap against the casement. 
“I must get up and close the window.” 

Yet she would have dropped asleep again 
had not the sound continued insistently. She 
255 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. 
To her surprise, the stars were shining through 
the window, and no raindrops but a handful 
of gravel pattered on the sill. She jumped 
up, drew her big coat about her, for the 
night air was cold, and leaned out. A shad- 
owy figure, unrecognizable in the starlight, 
stood below her. 

“Miss Deems,” came a voice, a rich Irish 
voice that after a moment of doubt she realized 
was Dan O’Leary’s, the man who used to care 
for Buck; “Miss Deems, there ’s the deuce and 
all to pay down in the town to-night, and this 
Dabney Mills here vows that it was your 
doing.” 

She discerned then a second figure skulking 
among the shadows, a very crestfallen Dabney 
Mills, brought hither evidently by no desire 
of his own. 

“He came to the meeting,” went on Dan, 
“and gave us a long tale of how John Her- 
rick’s past had come out at last, how he had 
256 


HASTY WORDS 


got into disgrace back East and came here 
to lose himself and take another name. And 
from that he argues that it was John Herrick 
took the money we have all been looking for 
this long time. I thought it only best to come 
straight to you for the truth, since the fellow 
here was quoting you.” 

Poor Beatrice’s teeth chattered with cold 
and misery as she leaned against the window- 
frame and, below her breath, tried to explain 
just how matters stood. Had Aunt Anna 
been wakeful, she would have been reading in 
the room below and would have overheard, but 
fortunately she was sleeping soundly on the 
sleeping-porch at the other side of the house. 

“Some of what he said is half true,” Bea- 
trice began, “and some of it is all false.” Dan 
O’Leary listened to the end of her story with- 
out comment. 

“I was hoping you could give him the lie 
direct,” he said finally. “The men below are 
wild with anger and are comnig up the hill 
257 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


to tax John Herrick with wrecking the com- 
pany. They were walking and we had horses, 
but they ’ll not be so long behind us. Well, 
I ’ll go back and stop them if I can.” 

“Could n’t you — could n’t you go up the hill 
and warn him?” Beatrice asked desperately. 

“No, they ’d call me traitor if I did, for, 
though I ’m a good friend to John Herrick, 
after all I ’m one with those below and 
pledged to help them. We ’ll be going back 
now. I ’ll do the best I ean. Here,” to Dab- 
ney, “get on your horse and come along. It ’s 
just such know-nothings as you that let loose 
most of the mischief in the world.” 

After they had gone, Beatrice still stood, 
clinging to the window-frame, stunned and 
bewildered. This, then, was the result of her 
angry words; this was the mischief that she 
had set on foot. What could she do to make 
amends? She did not have to think long, but 
she turned from the window with a sigh that 
was nearer a groan. She must lay the whole 
258 


HASTY WORDS 


matter before John Herrick, tell him the 
real truth of what she had said and what had 
been the result. He could never forgive her; 
of that she felt sure. She had put an end, 
all in a minute, to that new-found trust and 
friendliness that had been so hardly won. 
Yet it was the only thing to do. 

Buck, who had been brought home a week 
before, sprang up from his straw bed at the 
sound of his mistress’s footsteps. He sub- 
mitted, for once, to being saddled without pro- 
test, as though he had been too full of curiosity 
concerning this strange night adventure to 
make any delay. 

Down the path to the gate they made their 
way, then up the trail as fast as Buck could 
be urged, with Beatrice’s head turned over her 
shoulder to peer down at the town below. 
One building was brilliantly lighted — the hall 
where the men’s meetings were held. There 
were lights in many of the houses, too, although 
it was so nearly midnight. Then, carried by 
259 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the chill wind that blew up from the valley, 
came the far-off sound of shouting voices from 
the throng of angry men who were marching 
up the trail. 

John Herrick’s house was alight also, for 
he was a person of late hours. She could see, 
as she came near, that he was sitting by the 
big table in the living-room and that Hester 
was nodding over a book in the chair beside 
him. Since he was up and about again, she 
seemed unwilling to leave him for a moment. 
Beatrice knocked, but could not wait for an 
answer and burst in upon them, beginning to 
pour out her story before she was half-way 
across the room. 

Hester, starting up, listened in frank be- 
wilderment, but the expression on John Her- 
rick’s face was quite different. Her tale was 
none too plain, but he seemed to guess, long 
before she had finished, what it was she was 
trying to say. 

“Tell me,” he said at last when she paused; 

260 


HASTY WORDS 


“tell me one thing.” Her heart sank, for his 
eyes were hard and his tone was harsh and dry. 
“Why did you come here? Was it to warn 
me, so that I could go away?” 

“Oh, no, no,” she gasped, still breathless 
and incoherent. “I only felt that you ought 
to know what harm I had done. I wanted 
you to be ready to explain to the men when 
they came that it was I who had ” 

“Do you mean,” he interrupted her, lean- 
ing forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on her 
with a strange, intense eagerness; “do you 
mean that you do not believe as they do? 
That you don’t suspect me of stealing that 
money?” 

The blank astonishment on Beatrice’s face 
was answer enough. 

“It wouldn’t be possible!” she declared 
simply. 

He leaned back, and put his hand over his 
face as though suddenly weary. 

“God bless you, Beatrice,” he said. “I will 
261 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

remember that always, that you believed in 
me.” 

He rose slowly, limped across the room, and 
opened the door of a safe, let into the wall 
between two bookcases. He brought out two 
steel boxes, and set them on the table. 

“Now go and open the doors,” he said, “so 
that when our friends arrive, they can come 
in at once.” 

While he unlocked the boxes, Hester went 
to do as he had directed; but Beatrice, won- 
dering and fascinated, could not leave his side. 
The first lid that he lifted showed bundles of 
bank-notes, and the second, shining piles of 
heavy gold pieces. 

“Yes, this is the money that was missing,” 
he said. 


262 


CHAPTER XV 


A SONG FROM OYER THE SEA 

F OR a little time there was no sound in 
the big room as Beatrice stood gazing 
in open-mouthed astonishment at the piles of 
gold and silver pieces heaped upon the table, 
while Hester stood at the outer door to listen. 
The night sounds of the mountain came in: 
the wind among the trees, the squeaking of a 
bat, the far-off yelp of a coyote. Presently, 
however, these faint noises were drowned in 
another, distant but growing nearer and 
louder, the angry voices of excited men and 
the tramp of feet upon the road. 

Beatrice went to the door beside Hester and, 
for what seemed a very long time, stood wait- 
ing without a word spoken by any one of them, 
so intently were they all listening. Much as 
263 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


Beatrice desired that John Herrick should ex- 
plain the presence of that money upon the 
table, she dreaded his speaking, for she wished 
to lose no sound of the tumult that was coming 
ever nearer up the hill. 

The crowd of men was in sight now, climb- 
ing the last rise of the trail. They were sing- 
ing some wild foreign song: it might have been 
Russian, Polish, Hungarian; she knew not 
which. The words conveyed no meaning to 
her, but the loud harsh cadences seemed to cry 
out a message of their own : a song of blind tyr- 
annies and passionate rebellion, of cracking 
whips and pistol-shots, of villages burning 
amid curses and weeping and the cries of chil- 
dren. She shivered with terror as the shout- 
ing voices came close. 

“If only they were Americans,” she whis- 
pered to Hester. How could any one con- 
trol such a mob which scarcely understood a 
common tongue? 

“There is no knowing what they may do,” 
264 ? 


A SONG TROM OVER THE SEA 


Hester whispered in answer, “but if any one 
is able to quiet them, Roddy can.” 

The men came tramping up to the foot of 
the veranda steps and stopped — a dense, hud- 
dled throng with a tossing lantern carried here 
and there that showed the dark faces and the 
shining, excited eyes. A few figures stood 
out against the foreign backgrounds: a hand- 
ful of American and Irish laborers, Dan 
O’Leary, head and shoulders taller than the 
others, Dabney Mills hovering on the outskirts 
of the group, talking incessantly and entirely 
unheeded. 

Thorvik stood on the lowest step, his back 
to them, bareheaded and pouring out a stream 
of eloquence. Two or three men stepped up 
to him and began an earnest discussion, which 
waxed hotter and hotter as the minutes passed, 
as the crowd quieted, and as all stood waiting. 
Dabney Mills joined them, shaking his head 
and protesting vehemently. Beatrice, lean- 
ing forward, caught enough of the broken 
265 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


English to understand the meaning of their 
hesitation. They were arguing as to which 
should go in first. Inside a great sum of 
money was spread out upon the table, with no 
one to guard it but an injured man and two 
girls, yet these disturbers of the night’s peace 
were quarreling as to who should enter first. 

It was Dan O’Leary who pushed through 
the crowd finally and strode up the steps. 
The girls turned to watch him cross the hall 
and stop before the table where John Herrick 
sat unmoving. 

“Well, boss,” the Irishman said simply, 
“how about it?” 

John Herrick’s thin face relaxed into a 
smile. 

“Why don’t your friends come in?” he asked. 

“They ’re a bit shy,” Dan admitted. “I 
hear them talking it over how you can shoot 
straighter than any other man in Broken Bow 
County.” 


266 


A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA 


John Herrick’s smile grew broader and he 
got to his feet. 

“Then I supppose I must go out to them,” 
he said, “if they won’t come in.” 

He limped slowly across the hall and out 
upon the steps, while a great roar went up 
from the men as he appeared. 

“The money of which there has been so much 
talk is in there on my table. Is there any 
man who cares to come in to count it?” 

There was no answer, nor did any one come 
forward. Thorvik, hurrying from one to an- 
other, whispering, pointing, urging, seemed to 
have no influence at all. Dabney Mills, shrill 
and abusive, shouted something from the back 
of the crowd, but no one moved. Dan 
O’Leary burst into a great roar of laughter 
and slapped his knee. 

“You should have heard them tell, on the 
way up the mountain, what they were going 
to do,” he declared to Beatrice at whose side 
267 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

he was standing. “Thorvik and Mills, why, 
they were breathing fire, and now look at 
them.” He stepped forward and stood by 
John Herrick. “Boys,” he said, “I ’m 
through. I came up here with you to ask the 
boss a question, to find out if he had got away 
with any of the Irrigation Company’s funds. 
Well, I don’t care any more to ask it. I know 
he ’s all right.” 

Beatrice turned at a sound behind her and 
saw Olaf, followed by old Julia and Tim, 
come pushing through the door in the hall 
within. The man and the woman were both 
deaf and the boy slept in one of the outbuild- 
ings, so that they had only just now been 
awakened by the noise. Olaf’s eye was fixed 
unwaveringly upon Thorvik, and that worthy, 
suddenly becoming aware of the fact began to 
sidle away into the background and disap- 
peared behind the bulk of a gigantic Slovak. 
Beatrice laid a restraining hand on Olaf’s arm, 
for John Herrick was speaking again. 

268 


A SONG FROM OYER THE SEA 

“You shall have an explanation / 5 he began, 
“though I have been waiting for you to un- 
derstand of yourselves. While you were talk- 
ing up your strike, or rather while your leader 
was talking and you were listening, the Irriga- 
tion Company was coming to the end of its 
funds. Why? Because, after your valuable 
Thorvik came to this camp, construction 
dragged, no man did a full day’s work any 
more, time and material and money were being 
wasted until the whole enterprise was at the 
edge of disaster. Was it easy to raise more 
capital, do you think, when the whole place 
was seething with discontent and everybody 
knew that a strike was coming? No, the men 
who had put money into the project, far from 
being willing to subscribe more, were wishing 
they could withdraw. It came about that we 
moved first, and shut down the work the very 
night that you were ready to declare a strike. 
It was a good thing for both sides. We all 
needed a little time to think things over.” 

269 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

He paused, as though for comment from his 
audience, but no one spoke and he went on 
again. 

“While you have been — resting, I have been 
working, and I have managed to arrange for 
enough capital to carry on the work to the end, 
on one condition. When things are not to 
your liking, you are to use the good American 
way of talking things over and settling them 
peaceably, not the method you brought with 
you from over the sea, of rioting and burning 
and stirring up hatred between one man and 
another. On that basis we can go on. In a 
crisis like this it is always easiest to blame one 
man, and you have chosen to blame me. What 
you have been saying about me I neither know 
nor care, but if you had used your own wits 
instead of Thorvik’s, you would have seen how 
things really stood. And I will tell you this. 
Through all this time of waiting, I have kept 
in my safe a sufficient sum in cash for imme- 
diate use, so that when the time came to begin 
270 


A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA 


again, we could go forward without a day’s, 
without an hour’s delay. It is there, as I said, 
ready for you to earn it. And now have you 
had enough of Thorvik and his talk of revolu- 
tions? Do you want to go back to work? 

“We want to go back,” shouted a voice from 
the crowd. 

It was an American voice, but its refrain 
was taken up in a dozen foreign tongues. 
Yes, it was plain that they were weary of their 
leader and that they wished to work again. 

“Then go home and get some sleep and we 
will start work in the morning,” John Herrick 
said. “The money will be there to pay your 
next week’s wages and there will be enough 
for one thing besides. It will buy your pre- 
cious Thorvik a ticket back to his own country 
and we will all see that he makes use of it.” 

“But — see here,” Dabney Mills’ querulous 
voice rose above the murmur of approval, 
“I’ve be telling them ” 

Then it was that Beatrice had the greatest 
271 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


surprise of all her life. She suddenly found 
herself standing on the step beside John Her- 
rick, telling what had happened, making plain 
to that strange, listening group, what was the 
source of Dabney’s story. With her hand 
holding to her uncle’s, she spoke out bravely 
and told the whole truth — just what had really 
occurred and just how the reporter had spied 
and listened and questioned and put together 
his so-called facts. She even found herself 
at the end, telling of Dabney’s inglorious en- 
counter with the bear. 

Although the men did not understand much 
English, her speech was so direct that they 
could easily comprehend the greater part of it. 
When she came to the story of the bear, such 
a shout of laughter went up that it drowned 
what little more she might have wished to say. 
The men slapped each other on the shoulder, 
told the story all over again to one another in 
their own tongues, rocked and chuckled and 
burst forth again and again in uproarious 
272 



Beatrice found herself telling what had happened 












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A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA 

mirth. It seemed to touch the sense of humor 
of every one of them that the strutting, vain- 
glorious young reporter should have been the 
hero of such an ignominious adventure. When 
the gale of merriment had somewhat laughed 
itself out, Dan O’Leary’s voice could be heard 
above the others. 

“We don’t need any more proof that they 
belong to each other,” he said. “The pluck 
of the little one and the pluck of the big one, 
they sure come from the same stock. And 
now let ’s be getting back and be ready for 
work in the morning. We need n’t spend our 
time waiting for Sherlock Holmes. He has 
gone on ahead, and another of our friends with 
him.” 

Under cover of the noisy laughter, two peo- 
ple had quietly slipped away. A pair of shad- 
ows flitting down the trail, a slim one and a 
sturdy one, were the last that Beatrice ever 
saw of Dabney Mills and of Thorvik. 

The crowd dispersed, and went trudging 
273 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

down the mountainside, as John Herrick had 
advised, to sleep in preparation for the work 
next day. Their voices and laughter could 
he heard from afar as they wound down the 
path — a cheery, comforting sound after the 
angry shouts and that wild, terrible song that 
had heralded their coming. Beatrice, stand- 
ing to look after them, felt a sudden wave of 
friendliness and good-will for the whole com- 
pany, which, a short time before, she had re- 
garded with such terror and repulsion. 

She went in at last to talk the whole matter 
over with John Herrick and Hester and Olaf 
and Dan O’Leary, who had stayed behind. 
They heard the whole tale, not only of the ir- 
rigation project, but of all that had led up 
to it. The story was of a man beginning with 
nothing and in ten years gathering the fortune 
that he was now putting into the watering of 
the valley. It was wealth reaped from the 
fertile, untried resources and the open-handed 
opportunities of a new country. The valley 
274 ? 


A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA 


was in the hands of prospectors and home- 
steaders when he came. He had seen the 
mines opened, the farms plowed from virgin 
soil, the wilderness changed to a settled 
country. After the pioneers and the farmers, 
had come the crowd of foreign laborers, to 
build the railroads, to pick the fruit, to rear 
the houses and dig the irrrigation ditches. 

“They are a blight on the country/’ said 
Olaf, but John Herrick shook his head. 

“We need them,” he insisted. “We have to 
help them and teach them; and their children 
will be good Americans. There are a few 
like Thorvik who will cause trouble to the end 
of the chapter, but we can make something of 
the rest of them.” 

It was the mountain above them that alone 
had not changed, he went on to tell them, al- 
though it was the mountain that had made the 
valley what it was. It had given its treasures 
of gold and silver, the timber and pasturage of 
its lower slopes; its roaring streams watered 
275 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


the fields and the valley was fertile with soil 
washed from its rocky shoulders. 

“A good part of the mountain belongs to 
me,” John Herrick said, “and a bit of it to 
Beatrice, too. I can go higher and higher, 
blasting its rocks, cutting its trees, but at a 
certain point I have to stop. There is no man 
yet who has conquered the wind and clouds 
and cold of the summit, and Gray Cloud 
Mountain is still master of us all.” 

When at last he ceased talking, it was only 
because Hester had dropped asleep in her 
chair and the gray dawn was showing behind 
the windows. Beatrice was still listening 
eagerly, and so was Olaf, who heaved a long 
sigh as the story came to an end. 

“I wish I were going to do things like that,” 
he said wistfully. 

“You are,” returned John Herrick, “and so 
is Beatrice, and Hester, too. There are just 
such adventures ahead of all of you, in times 
like these: every person who is growing up 
276 


A SONG FROM OYER THE SEA 


now will find his share of strange, new things 
to do. Now you must take Beatrice home, 
Olaf. You children should not have let me 
talk the whole night away.” 

Dan O’Leary, who had said very little, got 
up and held out his hand to Olaf as he said 
good-by. 

‘We ’ll be glad to see you down in the town,” 
he declared. “We ’ve got over some things 
we used to think about you, and we ’ve 
learned a great deal this night.” 

They rode slowly down the hill, and Bea- 
trice and Olaf turned in at her gate, still dis- 
cussing the night’s adventure. 

“He is a real man, John Herrick is,” was 
Olaf’s final verdict as they reached the steps 
of the cabin. “You can’t beat him for fairness 
or for pluck. And you know, the first time 
I saw you, I thought you were like him. I 
believe I had begun to understand that you 
belonged to each other long before any one 
told me so.” 


277 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 

She lingered on the steps, watching him lead 
Buck away to his stable and then mount his 
own horse. 

“I ride like a sailor,” he admitted as he 
climbed into the saddle, “and — I didn’t tell 
you — I am going to sea again next week. My 
mother does n’t like my going but I can’t stop 
ashore more than this long. Now that all this 
trouble is cleared up, I will go down to stay 
with her until I leave. And you will go to see 
her sometimes, won’t you, after I am gone?” 

“Yes,” promised Beatrice, “but we are going 
ourselves before very long. I can’t believe the 
summer has really passed. Hester is coming 
with us to go to the school where Nancy and 
I go, and John Herrick — can I ever call him 
anything else, I wonder — is coming too. But 
in a year we will all be back again.” 

He rode away, leaving her sitting on the 
steps, still wide awake and reluctant to go in. 
The cabin was very still, since evidently no 
one had awakened to miss her in the hours 
278 


A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA 


that she had been gone. She sat very quietly, 
watching the sky grow red between the black 
columns of the pine-trees, listening to the soft 
thunder of the waterfall and the growing 
chorus of the birds as they awoke with the 
awakening dawn. 

An approaching footstep surprised her. 
Some one had come very softly up the needle- 
strewn pathway while she sat there dreaming. 
It was a figure that she did not recognize at 
once — a person with outlandish clothes, and a 
yellow face, and with two bundles done up in 
blue cotton handkerchiefs hung on the pole 
upon his shoulder. After a moment of inspec- 
tion she exclaimed: 

“Joe Ling!” 

The Chinaman nodded. 

“I leave your house because trouble was 
coming,” he explained. “Trouble over now,” 
he waved his hand toward the village; “I come 
back again.” 

By some secret sense through which China- 
279 


THE HILL OF ADVENTURE 


men seem to know everything, he had got news 
of the outbreak in the town almost before it 
had occurred and had departed; but now, divin- 
ing just as quickly that the difficulty was over, 
he had returned. There could be no more con- 
vincing proof that peace and quiet were really 
restored in Ely. 

Beatrice thought for a moment, inclined 
at first to send him away. She was beginning 
to be more used to the strange ways of China- 
men, however. “And besides,” she reflected, 
“it will not do Nancy and me any harm to 
have a vacation from our work for these last 
days that we are here.” 

She nodded to Joe Ling and he made his 
way around the corner of the house, to be heard 
presently in the kitchen making preparations 
for breakfast as easily as though he had been 
in residence a twelvemonth. 

She would soon be going back to all the old 
interests, she thought, still without moving — 
back to lessons, dances, club meetings. How 
280 


A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA 

far away that had all seemed to be! Every- 
thing would look different to her now. She 
would never be discontented again nor wonder 
if the future was going to be dull, since she 
had once realized how much life can hold. 

Leaning back against the door-post, she sat 
contentedly staring out across the hill. In the 
room upstairs Nancy was stirring, for Beatrice 
heard the window close. Soon she would have 
to go in to relate all that had happened in the 
night, but just for a minute more she would 
watch the glowing sky, the moving tree-tops 
and the peak of Gray Cloud Mountain show- 
ing clear and sharp in the first light of dawn. 


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